4 ms·

It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.

• dustfinger 6mo ago
  It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
• RajT88 6mo ago
  It felt bigger because of a few things: 1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there. 2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
  • InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
    Yeah, the internet felt more like an unexplored place then. Now it feels like a service to access some other services, but back then, it felt like a real world that could contain anything.
• fidotron 6mo ago
  It totally felt bigger because so many experiences required access to specific physical objects and getting those took forever. 35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
• Keyframe 6mo ago
  Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms. As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
  • xhevahir 6mo ago
    Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.
    • palmotea 6mo ago
      I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).
      • Keyframe 6mo ago
        Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.
      • mike_hearn 6mo ago
        Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
        • palmotea 6mo ago
          > Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups. > They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis. IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.