When the Internet Was Somewhere You Went

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Introduction

Seeing the government’s proposal to ban social media use for children, and the general consensus of opinion that we all spend too much time on screens nowadays, has got me thinking about how dramatically our relationship with technology has changed in just one generation.

I’m old enough to remember life before the internet, and I still remember how excited I was to discover this amazing tool. So, when and how did it suddenly become such a big problem?

The Beginnings of the Internet for Consumers

I know the scientists had the internet for a few years before most of us became aware of it, but sometime in the mid-90s it started to be available to mere mortals. I still remember the noise, that extraordinary screeching, crackling sound a dial-up modem made as it desperately tried to persuade another computer somewhere in the world to talk to ours.

If you’re under forty, you’ve probably never heard it. If you’re over forty-five, I suspect you can hear it in your head already. That noise announced to the whole house that you were about to “go online.”

Because that’s what we used to do.

We went on the internet.

And then, after a while, we came back.

Nowadays, I’m not entirely sure any of us ever leave.

Before Home Internet

Before we had the internet at home, going online required a trip out. For me, and my boyfriend at the time that often meant an internet café.

Looking back now, they seem wonderfully strange places. They were “cafes”, in that you could get a cheap cup of coffee and a snack, to go with your internet experience, but unlike today’s coffee shops, it was never about the food or the ambiance, but more about your vision of the future…

You paid by the hour, logged in and explored this extraordinary new world where information appeared almost as if by magic. Rows of noisy computers filled with people checking emails, chatting in online forums or discovering websites that disappeared decades ago.

 When I started “surfing the net” (yes we really did say that!) I used search engines like Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves – Google hadn’t even really begun at that stage. Compared with today it was painfully slow, and often broke down, but compared with everything we’d known before, it was astonishing.

Falling in Love by Email

The boyfriend that introduced me to internet cafes, was also a work colleague of mine.

We worked in the same department at our firm, and like sensible adults trying not to advertise the fact that we were dating, we often communicated silently by email, even though we were sitting in the same room.

The email system was only within the company – in theory our secret messages could be seen by the IT people, but I’m sure they didn’t have time to read everything.

It seems rather quaint now. Today we’d probably send WhatsApp messages, emojis and photographs throughout the day.

Back then, not everybody had a mobile phone, not all phones had text, and most photographs were not digital, so an email felt almost exciting.

You waited for it. When it came you answered, trying not to blush or look too obvious as you pressed Send.

The internet wasn’t constant in the working environment. Our communications appeared in little moments throughout the day, and of course they were interspersed with real work.

Perhaps that made this way of communication feel more special; it certainly did for me.

To quote Jane Eyre: “Dear reader, I married him”.

The Arrival of Dial-Up

Eventually we joined the modern world and had the internet installed at home. I even helped my mum to connect to it in her home on a laptop and she went on a seniors’ computing course. Half the internet seemed to consist of chain emails and terrible jokes at that point, but she absolutely loved sending them to me, and I responded with the ones I had collected. It was so much more fun than just asking after each other’s health, and how work was going…

At the time we thought the internet was incredible but calling it “always available” would be stretching the truth somewhat. For a start your minutes used were billed to your phone bill, and they were pretty pricey, so you did have to budget a bit. Then when you did use it, you had to connect. Then you waited. Then you hoped.

And then, just as you finally reached the webpage you wanted…

Somebody needed to use the telephone, and shouted at you to get off the internet.

If you grew up with broadband, you’ll never understand quite how frustrating that was.

The whole family had to negotiate internet time.

“I just need to check one thing.”

“No, I’m expecting an email.”

“Can somebody get off the internet? I need to ring Grandma!”

Looking back, it all seems rather ridiculous. At the time it was completely normal.

Then Everything Speeded Up

When broadband came it felt like a miracle. Suddenly pages appeared almost instantly, and your family could still receive the phone call they were expecting.

You could stay online all evening if you wanted, and once I discovered online gaming, I’m ashamed to admit I sometimes did, to the detriment of my work the next day.

At the time we all thought we’d reached the future.

Of course, we hadn’t – the really big change hadn’t happened yet.

I certainly didn’t imagine that one day I’d carry something thousands of times more powerful than my home computer around in my handbag.

The Internet Escaped

For years the internet lived in one room – usually wherever the family computer happened to be and near to the phone socket.

Then Wi-Fi arrived.

Suddenly the internet wandered into the kitchen.

Then the lounge.

Then upstairs.

Then the garden.

And finally…into our pockets.

Looking back, I think smartphones changed our lives far more than home internet ever did. The internet stopped being somewhere we visited, and slowly but surely it became the background to everything.

Waiting for a bus? Check your emails and look at the timetable…

Standing in a supermarket queue? Look at some silly Facebook stuff…

In a doctor’s waiting room? Google your symptoms…

Watching television? Look up the actors to see how old they are now (or is that just me?)

Even sitting in the company of friends, there’s often a phone somewhere on the table.

I don’t think any of us really noticed it happening. It happened one convenience at a time.

Douglas Adams was Right

I’m not really complaining about all this – I absoloutely love the internet for the most part, and I have welcomed each technological change as it came.

Way back in the 1970s, long before smartphones existed, one of my favourite books (which actually began life as a BBC radio series) was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

If you don’t know it, the Hitchhiker’s Guide in the title, was a magical electronic guidebook that could answer almost any question.

As a child I thought that sounded wonderfully futuristic and the answer to all my problems.

Now I carry one in my handbag. In fact, most of us do.

In 1978, Douglas Adams imagined something that could tell us almost everything we wanted to know.

I rather suspect he didn’t imagine we’d also use it to watch videos of cats falling off sofas or argue with strangers about the correct way to make a cup of tea. He wrote satire but I’m sure he would be amazed at the farcical uses we put this amazing invention to.And honestly, now I have one it creates as many problems as it solves. Douglas Adams got that bit spot on. Technology rarely arrives quite as expected.

What We Gained from the Internet and what we lost

I’m definitely not saying that the past was better – there are so many new technologies that I wouldn’t want to do without now

• Maps that stop me getting hopelessly lost and tell me where the heavy traffic is.
• Video calls with family.
• Finding old friends and making new ones, even though I don’t often see the in real life.
• Running businesses from home.
• Being able to answer almost any question in seconds.

Those are extraordinary gifts.

But I sometimes wonder whether we quietly gave something away as well.

We lost the art of waiting patiently and maybe chatting to someone in the queue.

We lost the pleasure of being bored, and maybe going out for a walk because there was nothing else to do.

We lost whole evenings at home with family where nobody would interrupt us.

We lost finishing a meal without glancing at a screen.

We lost leaving work behind at the end of the day and knowing we would not be contacted until we went back.

Most of all… I think we lost the feeling that the internet was somewhere that we went to for a while and then came back.

Now it’s everywhere.

Final Thoughts

I certainly wouldn’t swap today’s technology for the screech of a dial-up modem.

I don’t miss waiting five minutes for a photograph to load line by line.

I don’t miss being disconnected because somebody wanted to use the telephone.

But sometimes…

I miss switching the online world off.

Back then, when I shut the study door, I knew I had left the internet behind until tomorrow.

Today, I’m not entirely sure any of us ever really log off.

Perhaps that’s why so many people are quietly trying to reclaim little pockets of life that belong only to them, and trying to teach our children not to rely on screens as much as we sometimes do.

Not because technology is bad.

But because, every now and again, it’s rather nice to remember that the real world doesn’t need a WiFi signal.

Do you have nostalgic memories about earlier versions of the internet. Please feel free to share them in the comments.

If you have enjoyed this you might enjoy other articles from my Somewhere Along the Way series