I have studied 19th century and 20th century before World War I extensively in university.
My grandpa was born in 1924 and died in 2020. He had a lot to tell about world before computers, mobile phones, even before TV.
I was raised by relatives born in 1924 and 1928 iirc.
For me internet is a fad. It will transform society, but it's importance will be less in 100 years or so. Assuming we start going to Mars like Elon Musk says.
I was raised by relatives born before WWI. Before the Titanic went down, even. I remember that it was my grandmother who pushed me to get my first computer, and the only reason I did so was because my Smith-Corona electric typewriter that I'd used for so many years both for my own college papers and club newsletters, plus for my clients' term papers, essays, and resumes, had died past fixing. I was told that it was getting hard to find parts and it wasn't worth fixing anyway. So a couple of people in the SCA took my grandmother and me to the place where they got their computer (an Amiga).
My first computer was an Amiga 500, and the printer was a Laser printer (needed one that would turn out good results for the clients and the newsletters, and that wasn't noisy). I still miss them.
The Amiga was never connected to the internet. It had a whopping THREE Mb of memory. A normal trip downtown or to the mall always included the purchase of more floppies, because I kept my clients' assignments and resumes. I never knew when they might want to update their resumes or revise a paper or submit the same paper for different classes, or even just a second copy of what they'd had me do, and keeping their old ones was easier than retyping from scratch (of course I charged them for a second copy - ink and paper cost $$, after all, which some of them didn't seem to understand, and I pointed out that there was a cost associated with keeping their old copies around because they took up space on physical disks).
But then there were the addictive aspects of computers, which I swore up and down would never happen to me. They were part of the pact I'd made with my grandmother: she put her foot down that I was NOT allowed to buy games (she'd paid for the computer and printer, as I couldn't begin to afford this stuff; they were godawful expensive in 1990). She'd read that some people got addicted to computer games and I was not allowed to do that.
I told her that 4 games came with the computer, and since the computer was so expensive, I should play the games "to get the money's worth out of it, right?" (using logic she would understand).
So she grudgingly agreed that Shanghai was okay (it's actually a very basic mah-jongg game). Ports of Call would be okay because it had to do with shipping and geography (I recently found it on Steam, playable - barely - on PC), and Zany Golf.
I LOVE Zany Golf. And I know that some folks here have told me that it's available for PC, and I've honestly tried it. But it's not playable, and I can't figure out why.
And then I tried the music disk. Wow, I could compose music on the computer! That was fun. It was also fun to take The Dune Encyclopedia, input the sheet music in that for a couple of the songs Gurney Halleck played in the novel, and find out what they actually sounded like.
Conclusion: The songs of Gurney Halleck were lovely in some aspects. In others... the people of the year 10,191 AG had very bizarre taste in music. I eventually transcribed it onto the paper I used for my own compositions, and tweaked it a bit so it was playable on the organ.
And then came what eventually led me here: My SCA friends gave me a copy of Civilization I. That's what eventually led me to my own "Civilization stories" of crazy/annoying AI opponent actions. Indeed, never trust the Aztecs with nukes. They were sneakily building them to take me out, when I decided to conquer them while trying to build up territory to protect myself from the Zulus, who actually did bomb me (thus teaching me the importance of building SDI in every city). Oh, and there was that French trireme that sank my battleship...
It took another decade or so before I would get my own PC and go online. Funny how a 5-week hospital stay without my computer didn't bother me. As long as my dad brought me the newspapers and weekly TV guide so I could tell him what to tape on the VCR, and I had books to read, everything was okay. I also had a notebook and pens and wrote a LOT of Crow: Stairway to Heaven fanfiction at that time, all of it longhand.
That first hospital stay was in 2001. Next time I had a long stay was in 2019, and after I was moved to a room, I asked my housekeeping helper (she was looking after Maddy for me) to bring my computer to the hospital. The rooms had wi-fi, and I was going nuts from boredom and because I'd get behind in so many things. That was shortly after my epic 2018 NaNoWriMo win, and I'd signed up to do an extra round of tens of thousands of words, but in 2 months rather than 1. I needed the computer there to keep that up and get my words counted on the NaNo site.
Some of the lab people were intrigued when I told them I was writing a book based on a computer game. So telling them about the story's progress helped make the blood tests and other tests a bit more bearable.
The internet provides so much of my reading, viewing, and social interaction nowadays. It's nice that if I want to look something up, Wikipedia or some other site are only a few clicks away, and I don't have to go to the library. It means that if I want to watch TV shows, I don't have to watch them on the actual TV, and in many cases, they're no longer available to watch on TV.
There are so many things that are doable now that were either not doable in pre-internet times, or they were, but not as conveniently.
Oh, and gaming? Yeah, I'm addicted to some of them, though not to the point that some other people are. A friend in Calgary said, "You should get into World of Warcraft." I told her no, I'd heard how some people really got into it too much, and I didn't want to risk the temptation. There's a reason why some people call it "Warcrack."
But others... my stats on Steam tell me I've played over 900 hours of a paint by number art game. That one and Pixel Art? Those can actually be turned into needlepoint patterns and stitched, if I wanted to, and that wasn't even the original point of the games.
Gaming led me to a bemusing situation with my dad and breakfast cereal. For awhile, there was a promotion in which computer game disks would be included in a box of cereal, and my dad couldn't figure out why I wanted those particular kinds of cereal. I told him, "You can have the cereal. I want the game inside it." So that's how I got my first Monopoly game for the PC.
The internet has enabled me to be in contact with people with interests in the same kinds of books. For years I was part of a Yahoo group dedicated to the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery series. We were all older adults who read those books from the time we were kids and started collecting them. I hardly ever found anyone in RL who was interested in discussing those books, so a whole group of people who wanted to talk about a decades-old teen mystery series was
fun.
And finding forums... every day is like a science fiction convention, in some ways. There are science fiction authors I can have a conversation with on TrekBBS, and I belong to Robert Silverberg's email group. There are Fighting Fantasy authors who are part of the FB group I co-admin. It was nice to have a conversation with Alan Dean Foster, over 20 years after we'd met at a convention in Edmonton. Another SF author I met at a convention is now a journalist who writes for
The Tyee, an online magazine that deals with political, environmental, and social issues in BC and Alberta.
So it's nice to know that I'm not the only non-Conservative in this region.
I could go on all day...
On the whole, I think it's been a net gain for me, but it's also definitely been a mixed bag.
