5 ms·

“The internet was small compared to your real life, which was something that happened offline.” Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainl

“The internet was small compared to your real life, which was something that happened offline.” Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainly, actually), but I find this interesting. What attracted me to the internet as a kid in the early 2000s was just how huge it was even then. Sure, you had to go looking for stuff rather than having it shovelled in front of you en masse, but there was such an enormous world of weird little creations that had nowhere else to exist. Stuff to see and people to speak to that I simply never would be able to otherwise.

fleddr 5y ago
I think you're misinterpreting the title, which admittedly is misleading. It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time". Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.
UweSchmidt 5y ago
Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important. I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible. Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Uh, tons of things went viral. Memes existed online long before "social media", going back to the 80s. Plenty of things had societal impact. I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy? More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > nothing went viral Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
To me the internet felt bigger in the early 2000s than today. I went to more individual web sites than I do now, though they had less on them, and there was more diversity in how individual sites looked than today.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  I agree with you. Instead of being four sites incessantly reposting from the other three, it was an adventure to type in random dictionary words and append .com just to see what lay on the other end. Perhaps even .net if you felt adventurous. These days, doing that gives the impression that the only options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle school.

fleddr 5y ago

I think you're misinterpreting the title, which admittedly is misleading. It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time". Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.

UweSchmidt 5y ago

Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important. I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible. Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...

hammyhavoc 5y ago
Uh, tons of things went viral. Memes existed online long before "social media", going back to the 80s. Plenty of things had societal impact. I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy? More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.
zozbot234 5y ago
> Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> nothing went viral Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

To me the internet felt bigger in the early 2000s than today. I went to more individual web sites than I do now, though they had less on them, and there was more diversity in how individual sites looked than today.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I agree with you. Instead of being four sites incessantly reposting from the other three, it was an adventure to type in random dictionary words and append .com just to see what lay on the other end. Perhaps even .net if you felt adventurous. These days, doing that gives the impression that the only options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle school.