being able to walk to your friends house?
Not linked directly to the tech, but generally the thing I miss the most was the optimism. In the 90s people were excited for the future. Crime was trending down, the economy was doing well, the government was paying down the debt, the internet was new and full of wonder. In general there was a push for you to be whatever you wanted to be no matter who you were. The beginning of a lot of breaking down and removing stereotypes and gender norms.
Some of this seems to have reversed, most of it ended on 9/11/2001. That attack killed a lot of the optimism and things line the PATRIOT ACT really put us on the dystopian track we find ourselves on now. Also a lot of the economic boom were from the deregulation that would cause massive problems later…
So, yeah generally I miss the optimism we had.
Being unreachable without it feeling weird—peace was built into the day.
This was such a beautiful thing.
Reading. I was such a bookworm before YouTube became accessible on phones.
I would always have two books going at a time. Reading was part of my bedtime routine. Now I just fall asleep watching YouTube stuff that I’d be no worse off if I didn’t watch. Except ma girl Moriah, she’s influenced a lot of my art and craft projects.
My nephews and nieces were raised on YouTube and mobile games. They literally do not know how to play imagination games, they need so much coaching and direction. As kids, we were always acting out our own scenes from TV shows or just our own imaginations. We’d play at lost explorers, under the sea adventures, Captain Planet, etc. It’s sad that the kids in my family just have everything fed to them by YouTube, they don’t know how to imagine games like this.
Heck, we used to dig up bits of broken crockery and be so proud of this bit of random teacup we found. It’s definitely an antique and not just a cup someone broke a few years ago.
It was such a blessing to not have every aspect of your life monetized by shadowy tech billionaires. I see that now. You could simply exist as a person without worry that something or someone would gather the most intimate details of your existence to sell to the highest bidder so they could better psychologically manipulate your purchasing decisions. If you wanted, you could disappear for a while to recharge in solitude - no cellphone cataloging where you are, no cameras generating records of your movements. Friendships were more solid. These were people like you that sought connection whether it was an activity or common experience. There were whole seasons when you were free to roam about and socialize or not, there was no expectation of you being productive every waking moment. It was a time when science and technology felt exciting - the next new discovery or invention would be something that would improve our lives. Computers were simple by todays standards and were centered around what YOU wanted to do with them, not just a conduit to shovel content to consume. It was an exploratory experience and you felt so accomplished when you got the hang of the interface. I can barely recall the feeling of knowing there was a brighter future ahead of you and that there were others in this world who cared and reached for it too.
Fuck, I’m crying as I write this. I’m mourning a world that no longer exists and can’t ever again.
Yours is the root cause of a lot of grievances posted here in response to this question, thank you for so aptly putting to words a thing that is so real yet hard for many to see.
Damn it.
I knew this thread was gonna make me feel things, and that those things were most likely to be ennui and worse, but did you have to cut right to the bone?
I wanna return to the 70s
Not knowing everything all the time led to more interesting conversations.
On a related note, not having to know literally everything a public person has done before feeling safe to express even the most basic support for their work.
I appreciate the accountability, I don’t want to support bad people, but back in the day it was like “I enjoyed that album” and then you went back to living your life. Lack of information made separating the art from the artist the default and it made enjoying new stuff take so much less effort.
And at least half of this is just the fact that these people had less reach and weren’t able to be on TV all the time. Back then the CEO of Sears may have thought trans people were monsters, but he wouldn’t have been pushing it on the news or Twitter every day/week.
Orson Scott Card - Ender’s Game
DilbertOne thing that was interesting to me about OSC is that he publicly came out in support of gay marriage pretty early. His reasoning wasn’t moral or supportive, though; he just said that it was inevitable and therefore not worth fighting.
That makes it even more bizarre to me that he’s a practicing Mormon.
No disagreement.
I made a friend a few years ago that would whip their phone out during our conversations to answer my questions or theories about the topics we were discussing. Every single time.
IMO a conversation is just that, I enjoy discussing ideas and theories about subjects I’m not 100% familiar with and want to hear your thoughts and theories as well.
To slice through all of that with a ‘let me google that for you’ was very much not the interaction I found enjoyable at all.
Yes, also. More strongly I feel not being able to contact or be contacted, on chronic but varying intervals, gave me a freedom i didn’t grasp by then, free from worries or work dependancies. I feel I was more independent and more relying on myself.
The mobile communication tool has became something else.
I still say I prefer wild conjecture.
Also less self proclaimed experts.
As a self-proclaimed expert of grammar, I can tell you that the word is “fewer”, as self-proclaimed experts are (supposedly) countable.
I miss the higher level of engagement and interactions with another person or group when socializing.
Now that everyone has a computer in their pocket, they have an alternative (and sometimes primary) source to engage with during social interactions and events. Now instead of using social skills to change, deepen, or otherwise adjust conversation and engagement on an individual or group level, many people opt out and zone out on their phones instead.
It started with texting. I noticed that at parties or small group interactions, people would oscillate between interacting with the group and texting others either in attendance or not, whichever entertained/engaged them the most. Suddenly instead of parties being full of people who were there to be there and interact with others there, they became full of people who were there until the next exciting thing flashed on their screens and they would just leave without even really being there anyway.
What I’m saying is that people used to be engaged and dedicated in a more wholistic way when socializing, and I miss that. I hate that texting others while you have someone right in front of you that you agreed to spend time with is normal. I hate that I can’t trust anyone to value my time as much as I do theirs, and that apparently I’m taking it too seriously if I do.
Socializing in a spontaneous way.
You showed up, no idea who was gonna be there. Genuine unplanned interactions and meet new people.
Privacy.
I remember when it all first started. They’d say “If you don’t have anything to hide then what’s the problem?” Now look where we’re at, have an emergency, trying to get out of a bad situation, maybe the forest is on fire - sorry your car won’t start until you calm down. Give it another few years and it’ll be much much worse. Anyone who supports this is a complete moron.
And healthy skepticism. People too easily hand over their personal info these days.
We could go outside unsupervised.
Which is odd, since not only can you call for help, but crime is way down now
But fear mongering is way way up.
Ironically, it’s much safer now because of all the horrifying things that happened to kids when we were young
I think it’s more that the crimes that are committed are just more widely reported.
I don’t even live in the US but every time someone in Florida throws a bagel at an alligator it gets reported internationally.
This is actually the result of specific differences between Florida’s laws around publishing crimes in the news compared to other states. I forget what the right term is and the exact laws, but basically in Florida everything can end up in the news right away while I believe other states limit what can be published before the court rules on a crime below a certain threshold, so the crazy stuff stops being interesting and gets forgotten about long before it could ever get published in other states.
Or something along those lines.
It’s called the sunshine law. All police reports in Florida are a matter of public record that can be obtained by anyone. The press trolls those reports multiple times a day.
We’ve also seen the death of third spaces and a major wave of helicopter parenting that simply could not exist before the way it does today.
My parents were shocked when me and some people around my age were ambivalent about getting our driver’s licenses as teens, because for them it was like the first real bit of “adult freedom” in their lives. But by the mid 2000s, it was a very different world from when they were kids. Malls were dying, 3rd spaces were being monetized or removed, and existing in public for free was already becoming a difficult prospect. The idea of being able to go to a place to hang out had already been dying off when we were kids. What were we going to do, spend our time after school working to spend that money to drive somewhere that we’d then have to spend more money at to just hang out? When we could just sit around and play video games for free? Owning a car largely just meant suddenly having bills to pay and more responsibilities.
And the advent of cell phones (and social media) made it even worse. The prospect of people getting a call at any time from their parents asking where they were and who they were hanging out with was starting to raise its head as an issue. Today it’s even worse with the tracking apps on kids’ phones and devices in their backpacks or cars. I still remember the first and last time I posted something on Facebook. Right when Facebook was first starting to get big, a friend of mine made me a Facebook account. My first and last post was a comment about how 8am classes sucked, which my dad commented on “But they’ll go anyway.” Immediately upon reading that, I wondered to myself why anybody would willingly subject themselves to having their personal thoughts broadcast and judged/criticized like that and never logged in again.
GPS tracking kids like that is child abuse. It’s miserable what kids these days are subject to. No wonder mental health is in the toilet. I’m probably about a decade younger than you, can I can confirm there was nowhere to go.
I assume if you remember that you’re old enough to go outside now unsupervised too.
And yet, cameras everywhere
There were cameras everywhere in the 90s too, though. They’re just a bit smaller now.
Everything. The world had so much before we started spending our present in phones. I had time for art and hobbies and writing. I did so much exploration and sports and socializing. Road trips, and events, and helping others. Things were memorable.
Now is more like an addiction. The time goes but I’m never sure where it went. I barely have time to sleep, much less any other activities
Not needing an account to do everything.
You paid at the door, you enjoyed your bowling/concert/etc, you didn’t get adverts for the rest of your life.
I just don’t like the account nonsense.
If it’s required at a physical business, guess I’m going home.
The ability to not be available 24/7 or expected to be. Employers with the advent of cellphones and their ubiquity expect that from you and they can fuck right off.
That’s what do not disturb is for. I tell them I don’t even get alerts after 5 pm and before 8 AM. My phone won’t ding so don’t call.
Only time it isn’t is when we negotiate overtime before the emergency.
They still expect it and some raise hell if you miss a single call for even the smallest of things.
i’ve got my boss trained to not bother calling after hours. He was grumpy at first, and probably still is, but i just cant make myself care enough to read that email.
why don’t you miss that?
Could probably word it better, one moment.
Written from my stream of consciousness, edited for grammar:
The simplest answer is that we were able to do dumb things and make dumb choices without it becoming a viral moment that haunted us.
The things that kids in high school did that would be life-shattering now were little more than rumors to most kids in the school. There was no video that circulated, no major social media that allowed the school to sit in judgment of whatever was happening. The thing happened, people talked about it for a few weeks, and aside from a handful of mean people, everyone moved on.
I’m of the Jackass generation, so we had our fill of stupid. We had our fill of online danger too, but there was less permanence to the choices we made in the moment most of the time. We were free to be stupid, and being stupid is a part of growing up that we’ve forgotten.
Online was different, it was better. I’ll die on that hill. We communicated with each other instead of trying to win a popularity contest. Some of the old viral videos were just made to test software and goof off. It was real and human in a way that has been replaced by commercialization. There was stuff you shouldn’t see. There were people you shouldn’t talk to. But the majority of digital spaces and forums were about communication, debate, and understanding. Yes, there was a lot of degenerate content, but those spaces were relegated to the darker corners of the internet.
I learned more about world history, labor history, sociology, and finance than I had ever learned in high school. Every instance of learning came with the ability to ask questions, and those questions got answered thoroughly, sometimes with sources. It wasn’t a game to find the perfect pun or insult. The top-rated comment was the one most people agreed with or appreciated.
I know it isn’t the main part of the question, but I honestly blame Tucker Max for the start of the downfall. In his autobiographical book, he walked through a lot of early social engineering and manipulations that I came to see as commonplace online.
I know this is long for the modern internet. It wasn’t for my internet. This was about cell phones. My mistake, but then again, the modern internet is experienced through the cell phone. We had to use a computer in the living room or go to a friend’s house and access the internet when everyone was asleep. That way we didn’t mess with the phone line.
We had walkie-talkies to keep in touch with family in case of emergencies. Sleepovers weren’t about scrolling on phones and showing each other videos. We did do that. We used the computer to look at YouTube videos, but we also walked around at night when we shouldn’t have, played video games until dawn, and watched Real Sex (the show) on TV. Things were just a little bit harder, so you had to work a little to get anything.
Something else, no matter what you were doing or where you went, you didn’t just take a walkie-talkie. You had your radio, then a Walkman, then an MP3 player. You brought your Magic or Pokémon cards to trade. Maybe you would need your camera or a copy of Game Informer, or a cheat code book, etc. Every time you went out, you had to decide what was important to bring, what options you wanted for playing and experiencing things together with your friends.
We were more able to be bored, and that made us more able to be creative, or stupid, if we’re bringing it full circle.
I know this seems long, but this post is almost standard for some writing from back then, online at least.
The part near the start about things not being permanent. We can get back to that, people simply need to collectively get over the fact that people do dumb shit sometimes. We, as a society, used to know this. You would get ragged on for a bit, then it was simply a funny story years later you and your friends re-tell while you laugh at how dumb you all were.
We also forgot one should not use their real name online. That is still the biggest WTF to me.
Overall I agree with yourself and the original reply, I recall Will Smith (not my usual go to reference) being asked about the stupid esoteric bullshit his son was always posting - his reply was basically, thank God Twitter wasn’t around when he was young, people just forget the shit you did.
We should definitely get over people doing dumb shit sometimes, however people often try to pass things off as just dumb shit, when it’s actually a pattern of behaviour. Personally I think it’s about accepting that people can learn and change, maybe you posted something stupid 10 years ago, are you still doing it? Can you reflect and say that was a bad choice? This is how I look at it.
Yeah I think when it’s a bunch of adults brigading against a 15 year old who did some dumb shit and it got caught on video it’s gone way too far. Let the parents, teachers whoever is actually involved with the situation deal with the kid.
I’ve seen some ridiculous stuff on reddit with people vying for kids to be beat up over, honestly, stupid stuff but not dissimilar to crap I did at that age. When I got caught I was just disciplined by my folks, grounded or something.
Some of that stuff IS funny to look back on - because it wasn’t caught on video and you can choose your audience to reminisce with like jfc what was I thinking, funny but damn that was a dumb/dangerous thing to do. In my 30s and still finding silly stories to tell my folks about shit I did they never know about. We roll our eyes, have a laugh or a omg, and thank god that I grew up alright 😅
I agree 100%. There used to be a level of unspoken understanding. Not everywhere, but there was a vocal majority that defended the stupidity of the young.
The problem is that you can’t do stupid shit without creating a permanent video record. You can’t say stupid shit online without creating a permanent record. I don’t miss being as stupid as I was when I was younger but I do miss the freedom, knowing that there was a limit to the consequences of your actions. Every single thing I said and did was not preserved in searchable form, to potentially come back and haunt me for the rest of my life. You have to be so careful nowadays and you have to internalize that as a fact of life. You are being watched and recorded, for ever.
Yes - the thing about being free to be stupid! I honestly feel sorry for kids these days getting torn apart for doing yes, stupid, sometimes even rude/dangerous shit because it’s caught on video and posted to a forum of (often) adults who were apparently all really well behaved in the 90s and before as teenagers lol.
I did some pretty shitty stuff too as a kid, silly pranks and being a public nuisance that I can just remember when I catch up with an old friend and be like fuck what were we thinking when we did that man 😅 thank god we didn’t get hurt/get caught/nobody got hurt, etc.
These days, kids don’t just get disciplined by their folks, if someone posts it online they get all the damn internet calling for them to be beat around and all kinds of stuff. It’s weird.
I miss not experiencing the pressure to be always available. To always respond.
If you were out of the house and someone wanted you they waited until you got home. If it was a true emergency, they could figure out the phone number to wherever you were, maybe, but short of that? You wouldn’t be bothered.
There was also a level of spontaneity I miss where you might drive looking for a place to eat and just stop at the first place that looked good. Or you were going somewhere specific but you just drive to the general area and look for a sign.
I delivered pizza using a map of my city and I got real familiar with how roads worked.
It was so much easier to keep friendships. Holy fuck. The amount of people who get upset if you don’t text back within a few hours is insane. And it just keeps going forever - like a never ending game of tag.
I’d rather be lonely. God damn.
Sounds like you just need better more understanding friends
