40+: How did the concept of everyone using the internet by 2010s seem to you

[Amara 94]

I know for people under, I will say 35, the internet seems very normal and not hard to conceive since we grew up with personal computers being accessible.

I ask this as I was watching a video on openpilot vs tesla. Although I can trust that self driving cars will become the norm in a few decades, if I am being honest, I find the concept of most cars being autonomous hard to actually believe happening. I first heard of autonomous cars at around 20 years old.

But I don't own a car, still haven't done my driving license although I know some form of autonomous tech is normal in probably every new higher end car and watching the vid probably most new cars can be updated to use openpilot autonomous software. Also looking at stuff like how mobile phones and reliable internet connection rapidly improved, it seems logical that autonomous tech would go through rapid stages of development that it becomes more and more accessible and reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMxyLHJKGGc

[Dougella]

I grew up without the internet and I don't think I even considered how it would eventually affect things! It seemed to creep into our lives slowly. That's probably what will happen with things like self driving cars, there will slowly become more common, as will electric cars.

[limey123]

I was approaching my mid-20s when the Internet was becoming mainstream. It seems young folks these days can't do anything without connectivity but my generation and older had to do without instant communications and instant answers. We had to rely on our memories and pens and paper.

I find the prospect of self-driving cars terrifying.

[Gosties]

I kind of preferred the anonymity before the internet age and subsequent development of the mobile phone apps etc. I liked the sense of freedom and being cut off on occasion whereas now nearly everything is connected.
I'm old enough to remember pre-internet and can cope without it. Although forums like this offering support would not be possible without the internet.

I passed my driving test in February and don't like the idea of self-driving cars but enjoy the freedom of not having to rely on public transport any longer.
Which in light of Covid certainly passed my test at the right time.

[Mr. Nobody]

I can recall only having a house phone, and no idea of internet at all,

the reality of internet was very slow at first, and seemed a bit pointless really.
but I suppose it has become quite ubiquitous now, in some instances almost entirely relied upon,

I think it's incredible and actually a bit scary how quickly things have advanced technologically in just the last couple of decades,

I'm hoping that people slowly start to rely on technology a bit less,
I can understand the sudden engrossment in it initially,
but I hope things settle back to a less immersive level,

I'm not entirely sue it's healthy or appropriate for us as humans to be so immersed in and reliant upon the digital world.

[Mr. Nobody]

Originally Posted by limey123

I find the prospect of self-driving cars terrifying.

yeah,. I find them terrifying too,

there's a lot more 'driver aids' coming into modern cars which seem prone to fault, or basically more trouble than they are worth,
some almost seem based upon the premise that human beings are incapable of focusing on the road in front of them and their immediate surroundings and being aware whilst driving,

one, for example is a braking systems which activates without the driver's input,
it's based on sensors in front of the car which detect close objects and then apply the brakes,
I've heard you can be driving along the motorway at 70 and your car will suddenly brake hard because a crisp wrapper flys in front of your car,.(which is dangerous)
I know what the idea is,.. some people have crashed into the vehicle in front,. so this device eliminates that danger.. apparently.
but the more you take away or eliminate driver input, the more you give the driver the impression that they don't need to be aware, they don't need to apply their minds to focus on driving,.. it's allowing drivers to de-focus and switch-off,. which is a bad move in my opinion,

other driver aids coming in now are ones which detect the road markings and keep your car within those markings,..
so, if a road hasn't got markings it won't operate,
if the road is wet and reflecting sunshine it won't detect lines,.
if you're overtaking, it will sense this as an unwanted deviation and pull your car back in line,
the danger could be that you will react to that and send the car into a skid,. and crash,

there's loads more coming on board regarding fuel changes, with all cars moving to electric charging in the next decade,
where will all the chargers be?
how far will you get on a charge?
how long will it take to charge your car?
how many other people will be wanting to charge their car at the same charger?
will there be a queue of people waiting in line to charge their car?..
I hope they have some kind of plan for how this is going to happen.

[gregarious_introvert]

Looking back, it seems like there was a day when the internet wasn't there - and then it was! For me, it all started at the age of 33, when I got my first pocket-sized mobile telephone (which I couldn't afford to use, as in those days, calls were prohibitively expensive and even the connection cost £10-£15 per month); I'd actually had a job selling mobile 'phones a few years earlier, but these were the massive ones which had a battery pack one had to wear like a satchel - and which cost around £1500 each (plus connection charges).

When I was 34, I was setting up something from home which required a computer; I had to buy one second-hand (£500) which ran on Windows 3.11 and had 420Mb HDD, 4Mb RAM and a speed of 66Hz! I asked about internet access, but was told that I would need something more powerful and that, anyway, it would be a long time before universal internet access was available. Two years later, I was upgrading and had (dial-up) internet access for the first time. I was 40 years old when broadband came along.

I've never really thought much about how things have advanced, it all seemed to happen so quickly - there was no computer at my school, then I had to learn programming at university (BASIC, COBOL & FORTRAN), which I never really understood and then I worked in an office where we had computers for our databases but had to use a separate Word Processor for letters because the massive mainframe couldn't handle both tasks! Now, I have more capability in my pocket than that office computer had.

Although I lived most of my life without computers or mobile telephones of any kind (we only had a 'phone in our house from 1966 - that was a revolution in itself), I struggle to imagine life without these advances - I couldn't live the lifestyle I have now without it. Air travel has become ridiculously cheap (this year, I travelled to Montenegro for £9.98 return) and I can pre-book my accommodation before travelling, rather than having to walk the streets looking for somewhere to stay on arrival (as I had to do back in 1986, when I did my first backpacking tour); not only that, I arrive with maps of entire countries downloaded onto my telephone, as well as train and bus timetables and anything else I might need - even my boarding pass is there. Of course, I could live without it (and did, for almost two thirds of my life), but I would miss it.

I do see Mr. Nobody's point about immersion in technology and I feel that I am, at the same time, immersed and not immersed; I use technology to facilitate easier access to a non-technological world (which, of course, is not non-technological, since I visit museums with pre-booked e-tickets, for example). I actually spend a lot more time outdoors than I did pre-internet, because the world has been made available - and even that would not have been possible, had I not found this forum to help me through my agoraphobia and give me a life, so really I owe everything to the internet!

I am, I think, quite selective in how I use the internet; I don't have social media, so I use it for convenience (travel, meetup, booking tickets etc.). I still give my home telephone number where possible, so I don't get bothered by calls to my mobile and can still live as I did in the 1970s and 1980s.

With regard to self-driving cars, this isn't something I relish as driving is one of my great pleasures; however, back in the 1990s, when I worked on Docklands Light Railway, we had self-driving trains (and at weekends, we would do safety tests where we tried - unsuccessfully - to crash them) and I can appreciate the elimination of human error as a great advance in safety (if the technology does what it's supposed to), so although I will lose the pleasure of actual driving, I will welcome it (plus, I will probably be about 70 by the time I have a self-driving car). I've been driving now for more than 40 years and although I consider myself a very good driver, I still make mistakes (as does everyone); over that time, I've been involved in a handful of crashes (none of which were my fault - especially those where I was parked at the time!) and I have seen a great many serious (and sometimes fatal) crash scenes, so if self-driving cars reduce the number of incidents on our roads, then my minor inconvenience at not enjoying my driving so much is incidental - plus, I may even be able to look out of the window and enjoy the scenery (I do look out of the window, of course, but it's to read the road).

All technological advances have pros and cons, it's up to us to use the positive elements and minimise the negative; so much has changed in my lifetime and the pace of that change is accelerating, but it has definitely enhanced my life to the point where it seems that my pre-internet life happened to someone else.

[choirgirl]

It didn't seem odd, but everything happened gradually. I am glad my youth wasn't recorded. And god knows what I would have written on the internet, likely under my own name.

[Jen.]

I'm almost 30 and don't remember a time before the internet, but I do remember using it as a young child and finding it very boring and confusing. Even websites aimed at children seemed awful. Until I was around 12 it felt more like an activity that you would choose to sit down and do with some specific purpose in mind, rather than something you could happily waste all day and night on doing nothing in particular. I sometimes wonder if this might be why I don't feel a compulsion to check my phone all the time. I can leave it for a few hours without checking and don't get anxiety about it. Maybe this is more to do with personality type than age though. It definitely feels like childhood must be very different now when there are unlimited options of things to do, and Sunday afternoons don't feel like they're going by as slow as months.

I can't imagine what it might have been like being a teenager without the internet. I think there was probably some benefit in spending those years socialising on forums and chat rooms with people of all different ages from all over the world. It would have felt like a small world if I'd just spent my adolescence with people my own age during the day and then been by myself or with my family in the evenings. I imagine I would have had a lot of things to work out when I got older.

Something I wonder about now is what it might have felt like before the internet when everyone you lost contact with after school would remain mysteries, whereas now you could quickly find out probably too much information about them if you did enough digging. I imagine people who get anxious about comparisons wouldn't have been too bothered hearing a rumour that someone they went to school with is now a millionaire, for example, since it's sort of removed enough from them that it might as well be a total stranger. It's probably different when you can scroll through photos of their holidays and keep track of everything they're doing in real time. Some people seem to get hung up on such insignificant things.

I think I would feel pretty safe if every car was self-driving. A combination of self-driven cars and human-driven cars wouldn't feel too safe to me though, but I suppose there would have to be a long period of that before they completely took over. Maybe it would happen with public transport first. There doesn't seem to be any reason why trams need human drivers anyway, at least in other countries. I can imagine it might be a problem here.

[choirgirl]

^Facepalm. Of course, the internet would have been a godsend. I'd be a different person. That would be worth the price of drunken antics being recorded and everyone from secondary school (who I do my best to avoid) knowing what a loser you are. I never thought about it because I didn't have it. I am a bit slow.

[Jen.]

I don't think young people today are unaware of the possibility of embarrassing moments from their youth being captured to torment them in the future though, that's why if drunken antics are documented it's largely done in the form of Instagram stories or on Snapchat, where everything will be gone after 24 hours. Regrets and embarrassing moments will probably still exist primarily as memories when the current young people get older. It seems that young people these days are mostly very aware of how they come across online and the permanency of things they say and do. Maybe this is why self-deprecating humour seems so widespread in young people, since if you can laugh at yourself then others laughing at you doesn't hurt so much. It would be difficult to bully someone for a perceived vulnerability that they're happy to put on display.

I'm glad smartphones didn't become popular until the very end of my time at secondary school. I often wonder about the new forms of bullying that didn't exist when I was young and how potentially damaging they could be. But then, there are probably some things I was bullied for that might not have happened if I was in school now due to people being exposed more to different cultures online. E.g. would a child be bullied for their "ethnic" lunches being different to everyone else's in the canteen, or would they be seen as cool because they have something different to everyone else and young people are scrolling through photos of all kinds of foods on social media? Children seeing and learning about all kinds of ideas and lifestyles online hopefully makes them less likely to target those who are different, and perhaps become more comfortable with themselves as they have access to an unlimited pool of people to relate to. At least teachers are now more educated about hate crimes, and bullying about race and sexuality is probably taken far more seriously than it used to be.

[Mo34]

I look back on my childhood and am probably glad I had no internet - I was outdoors, in the countryside and around animals. Had I had the internet I'd probably have been sat glued to you tube. Plus we played or hung out properly not virtually, we had to have conversations rather than messaging or posting on a social media sites.

I don't know if I thought the internet would be such a massive part of our lives, I do recall being still in Northants and on the car radio was increasingly adverts with them saying at www. and it irking my dad (the constant www being recited) so I must have been 12 or 13 at that point but we had no concept of what the internet really was or would become - we were still using DOS prompts on the school computers

I got a PC when I was 18? maybe, AOL dial up and although I couldn't watch videos on it, it was amazing. Amazing to have access to loads of info. It indeed led me to SAUK and lots of other sites informing me of social anxiety something my GP at the time never did.

I moved schools when I was 13/14 and facebook would have been a godsend to stay in touch with folk though to be fair i kept in touch with 4 or 5 ppl for years by good old fashioned writing letters. I have since reconnected with Northants folk on f/b which has been lovely . Surrey I was bullied a lot so there not having social media was probably a good thing, it would have taken it perhaps to another level.



There's an interview with Bowie and Jeremey Paxman somewhere where Bowie talks about the future impact of the internet in the late 90s I think. . Found it:

Bowie totally on it


Automated cars tho yes please. I find it hard to imagine it really happening but I wouldn't mind at all

[Amara 94]

^Yeah he did.

The potential of self driving cars is also massive. Imagine working while travelling, for everyone, traffic being rarer. The death of ownership would bring big changes to car design. Also driving jobs would die, so a big change in skills. Maybe a change in the way people choose to use transport, would less congested roads cause of the efficiency of automated cars mean less people choose to use trains, which I think would take as long or longer to fully automate, not just cause it's hard but cause rail infrastructure is old and trains are built to last 30+ years usually.

I don't exactly know what he means in the last sentence but I see that nowadays incomplete music is shown whilst being made and it's not rare to be responded to by a music artist. I don't know about the popular ones, but the more independent ones.

[Amara 94]

Originally Posted by Nanuq

I found it quite painful to lose touch with so many people in my 20s. Most of my friends went to University and travelled and for the most part didn't come back to their home town. Word of mould meant you could keep up with a lot of people but others went off the radar. I only stayed in touch with a handful of people through normal phone calls, visits and (so old fashioned!, letters) I spent 3 years living with my ex in Wales and when we split up I didn't know anyone who knew him and I used to worry something bad might have happened to him. I found that really difficult.
It's interesting because after I got on facebook and people reconnected, online these old friendships just reignited, I just have had a lot less life since then than most people, but I'm not really someone who compares themselves a lot so that doesn't really bother me.

I can keep in touch with old school mates on instagram and stuff however I find the connection extremely shallow and feel it's status oriented that I wouldn't mind if I didn't keep in touch.