3 ms·

As a teen in the 90's, I remember the first time I heard someone use the terms "surfing the internet", "surfing the web", "information superhighway", "cyber-any

As a teen in the 90's, I remember the first time I heard someone use the terms "surfing the internet", "surfing the web", "information superhighway", "cyber-anything"... I can assure you the terms were as cringe back then as they are today. I half-suspect the desperate attempts by the media to make it sound hip to boomers may well have set adoption back years.

bowsamic 3y ago
I was a teen in the 2000s and in my cultural sphere they weren't considered cringey at all (in fact, in 2000s UK we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today)
- timthorn 3y ago
  > we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today We didn't use the word in the same syntactical manner - things make you cringe, or are cringeworthty - but I can assure you that my very British mother was using the word properly to refer to the same kind of things back then. (And as a UK teen back then... yes, I cringed at the term!)
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spacechild1 3y ago
I'm also a kid of the 90s and I still use it :) At least in German, "im Internet surfen" has always been a completely normal expression for, well, surfing the internet. What would the hip people use instead?
- qup 3y ago
  "Hip" people don't surf the Internet, not really. They would say "I'm on insta"
  - spacechild1 3y ago
    So they are not really surfing it in the first place :)
zamadatix 3y ago
To me "Surfing the internet" is a bit formal but "surfing the net" or "surfing the web" is still a non-cringe thing said at the office and we're a bunch of computer networking engineers. "Information superhighway" has always been a cliche for me though... but I was quite young in the 90s and it had really died off by the 2000s anyways. Cyber- largely depends on the thing to me. E.g. cyberspace - about neutral, cybersecurity - not at all cringe, cyberculture - cringey, cyberbullying - neutral (as in the term, not the act), cybernetics - usually cringey, cybercafe - cringey/outdated, and so on.
- woooooo 3y ago
  "Information superhighway" has stuck around for 30 years as the perfect specimen of cringe. If it were less bad, we'd have forgotten it.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  "Cybernetics" has an actual meaning distinct from anything to do with the Internet, and precedes it by decades. It is about using feedback from sensors to control something. It was based on observations of biological control systems, and creating principles from them for machines. For example using a gyroscope reading in a PID-loop that runs motors to keep a robot steady. The word comes from "Kuber" in Greek, which means "to steer". The Internet-connotation comes from the "Cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer", where it was supposed to be jacked into the brain: thereby the connection to biological control systems, and thus cybernetics. I personally cringe at most modern uses of "cyber-". The only I don't to is "cyberpunk", which refers to environments and aesthetics as in novels such as Neuromancer.
404mm 3y ago
Tell me you don’t know anything about internet without telling me… I completely agree.
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
> make it sound hip to boomers What the heck is going on with this "age cohort" crap? The guys pumping out the technology in the 90s were born in the 50s and 60s. It was news to over 90% of the population, nothing to do with age. Sheesh.
- trealira 3y ago
  Yeah, a lot of people who developed important technologies (TCP/IP: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn; Unix: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson) were born in the 1940s. My grandmother is in the same age range, but barely knows how to use a cell phone. Many young people nowadays are apparently the same way. It seems like there's always been different groups of people with varying levels of familiarity with technology; it was never a generational divide.
  - deleted 3y ago
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bowsamic 3y ago

I was a teen in the 2000s and in my cultural sphere they weren't considered cringey at all (in fact, in 2000s UK we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today)

timthorn 3y ago
> we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today We didn't use the word in the same syntactical manner - things make you cringe, or are cringeworthty - but I can assure you that my very British mother was using the word properly to refer to the same kind of things back then. (And as a UK teen back then... yes, I cringed at the term!)

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spacechild1 3y ago

I'm also a kid of the 90s and I still use it :) At least in German, "im Internet surfen" has always been a completely normal expression for, well, surfing the internet. What would the hip people use instead?

qup 3y ago
"Hip" people don't surf the Internet, not really. They would say "I'm on insta"
- spacechild1 3y ago
  So they are not really surfing it in the first place :)

zamadatix 3y ago

To me "Surfing the internet" is a bit formal but "surfing the net" or "surfing the web" is still a non-cringe thing said at the office and we're a bunch of computer networking engineers. "Information superhighway" has always been a cliche for me though... but I was quite young in the 90s and it had really died off by the 2000s anyways. Cyber- largely depends on the thing to me. E.g. cyberspace - about neutral, cybersecurity - not at all cringe, cyberculture - cringey, cyberbullying - neutral (as in the term, not the act), cybernetics - usually cringey, cybercafe - cringey/outdated, and so on.

woooooo 3y ago
"Information superhighway" has stuck around for 30 years as the perfect specimen of cringe. If it were less bad, we'd have forgotten it.
Findecanor 3y ago
"Cybernetics" has an actual meaning distinct from anything to do with the Internet, and precedes it by decades. It is about using feedback from sensors to control something. It was based on observations of biological control systems, and creating principles from them for machines. For example using a gyroscope reading in a PID-loop that runs motors to keep a robot steady. The word comes from "Kuber" in Greek, which means "to steer". The Internet-connotation comes from the "Cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer", where it was supposed to be jacked into the brain: thereby the connection to biological control systems, and thus cybernetics. I personally cringe at most modern uses of "cyber-". The only I don't to is "cyberpunk", which refers to environments and aesthetics as in novels such as Neuromancer.

404mm 3y ago

Tell me you don’t know anything about internet without telling me… I completely agree.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

> make it sound hip to boomers What the heck is going on with this "age cohort" crap? The guys pumping out the technology in the 90s were born in the 50s and 60s. It was news to over 90% of the population, nothing to do with age. Sheesh.

trealira 3y ago
Yeah, a lot of people who developed important technologies (TCP/IP: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn; Unix: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson) were born in the 1940s. My grandmother is in the same age range, but barely knows how to use a cell phone. Many young people nowadays are apparently the same way. It seems like there's always been different groups of people with varying levels of familiarity with technology; it was never a generational divide.
- deleted 3y ago
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