As others have put it, I miss when the Internet was a place you visited rather than one that you brought with you. Nothing killed the Internet of old like smartphones. Social media, however, gets to be an accessory in the murder. Or maybe social media was the instrument and smart phones the culprit.
Think about it. Think about what the Internet used to be. If you were hopping on the Internet, you were hopping on for a reason. To visit a particular forum, to try and catch your crush on MSN, to play a Newgrounds flash game. The Internet used to be a vast place where every single person on it might be having a different experience. These days, the Internet is about half a dozen places: Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit. I mean, it's maybe not even that. It might only be Twitter and Reddit, if we're being honest (who cares about Facebook anymore?)
Now, the Internet is just background noise. You don't visit the Internet anymore, you
use the Internet to dull your morning commute or something. Sure, the Internet used to be restricted to a particular room of a house, but that was what made it special. Back in the day, if you were chatting with someone on MSN or AIM, you might very well have had their undivided attention. Or, at the very least, they probably weren't bouncing between half a dozen different things. You were having
conversations back then. Now, you're just sending messages back and forth.
I remember how
novel the Internet was. How you'd chat with people you'd never meet on the other side of the world because you shared hobbies or interests, and you'd come to know about them and care about them as friends. I remember, no shit, sending and receiving birthday gifts to and from the other side of the world. I remember how
genuine people could be on the Internet, because the Internet was generally made up of people who had the inclination and ability to get on it. Everyone online was probably some variety of nerd or loner or geek or outcast. Like, it's why the Internet had such a distinct culture, because it was made up of counter-cultural people. It feels like a paradox, but people were more open with their feelings and thoughts before the age of social media. Everything feels fake and insincere these days, and you need to be way more careful with your identity than you ever needed to be back then. But you could find your people, you could find your place. Geography didn't matter (so much.)
It's very odd. I have a good life. I don't regret much of what I've done. But I
really mourn the loss of the old Internet. I've always liked
this animation as it sums up the nostalgia on a broader scale than just World of Warcraft. I've watched every online community I've ever been a part of just fall apart and decay. Smartphones meant you could hop in and out of the Internet at will, and so began the fall toward rewarding that brief opportunity with the quickest dopamine hits possible. Social media suddenly made the Internet feel like it had to be a continuation of your "regular" life, not a wholly different place. The internet, I think, used to be a place of
creation. But now it's just another place to consume
. How quickly websites like Patreon made the rich, creative ecosystem of the Internet something that you had to pay for. Anyone who was on the Internet in the 00s can recall some of the startlingly good content that was created on communities like 4Chan and Something Awful for the fun of it.
And what's the with the porn? It feels like I'm the only one who remembers when things like "hornyposting" weren't seen as cutesy ways to interact on Twitter. It's funny remember how people used to freak out about the possibility of kids seeing porn on the Internet, when sexual content has become so normalized that it's almost the background radiation of social media.
Anyway, the Emily is Away series is an interesting simulation of the old Internet vibe. They're a nice walk down Memory Lane, watching old Youtube and old websites and everything. But even then, they lose something when the creator hits the early Facebook-era in the timeline...