Key Takeaways
- The author reflects on over twenty years of online experiences, noting significant changes in internet culture and community.
- She recalls how parenting forums provided support and connection for mothers before social media dominated.
- Blogging became a way to share experiences and earn income, leading to unexpected opportunities for many women.
- While the internet has opened doors, it has also led to loss of privacy and a shift towards performance and comparison.
- The author values genuine connection and community over the pressures of modern online presence, still cherishing the essence of blogging.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Table of contents
Sometimes I forget quite how long I have been online. Then something happens that reminds me.
The other day I found myself explaining to a younger friend what internet forums were like before social media took over. They looked at me with the same expression my children use when I start talking about cassette tapes or dial-up internet.
And suddenly I realised that I have spent over twenty years watching the internet evolve.
Not as a tech expert, nor a digital marketer, just as an ordinary woman who happened to be raising a family while building a life online.
Leaving Work for Maternity Leave
When I was pregnant with my first child, who is now twenty-three, I quit my job moved to a different place to be with my husband on his work placement, away from all my previous friends. Like most first-time mums, I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for, and so I went looking for advice and reassurance. I also wanted to know whether other new mums felt as nervous and overwhelmed as I did.
I found myself venturing onto parenting forums for the first time, and the internet became a lifeline. For the first time in history, ordinary women could connect with other mothers from all over the country without leaving their homes.
We shared stories, we compared notes, we worried together and we learned together. I did make real friends too, but it was wonderful to learn from my online groups, and then to help others, once I had a better idea of what was working for me.
Today if a new mother has a question, she might search Google, ask ChatGPT, or watch a TikTok video. Back then, we asked each other. Looking back, those early online communities shaped far more of my life than I could ever have imagined at the time.
When the Internet felt like a Community
The internet was very different then. There were no influencers, no reels, no content strategies.
People simply turned up and talked to each other. It was much more social and much less media.
Forums were messy, opinionated, supportive, funny and occasionally chaotic. If you know mums groups you will know that there is much talk of bodily functions, and ways in which small people can embarrass their parents in public. But we were real, and we showed each other real motherhood in all its facets, the good, the bad and the totally exhausting.
Nobody was carefully curating a lifestyle. Nobody was worrying about their aesthetic. Nobody was creating a content funnel. We were just trying to navigate motherhood together.
Many of the friendships I formed during those years have lasted decades, and some of those women are still part of my life today even though I haven’t met some of them in person.
That is the part people sometimes forget when they talk about the internet – before it became an industry, it was a really supportive community.
Discovering Blogging
A few years later, after experimenting with various home business ideas, I stumbled into blogging.
At the time it felt like a natural extension of the communities I was already part of. My children had started school, and I didn’t want to go back to my former profession. I have always enjoyed writing and thought it would be fun to share my experiences and stories
Like many mothers, I wanted to contribute financially without sacrificing time with my children.
Working from home was still relatively unusual then. Blogging wasn’t a get rich quick scheme, but it did offer a small supplemental income. There were no endless adverts promising passive income and six-figure lifestyles. Most of us were simply trying to create a life that worked and this worked for me perfectly.
I started writing about motherhood, home business and the realities of juggling both. To my surprise, people actually read it. Then opportunities started appearing that I had never expected. The internet opened doors that simply would not have existed for previous generations of women. For that, I will always be grateful.
What We Thought the Internet Would Become
Looking back, I think many of us believed the internet would make life easier.
We imagined a future with more flexibility, freedom, connection and opportunity, and in many ways, it delivered exactly that.
I was able to work from home while raising my children. I connected with people across the world. I built businesses and friendships that changed my life.
The internet gave ordinary people a voice, and for a while, it felt genuinely revolutionary.
What’s happening now?
The biggest change I have noticed recently is not technological, but instead it’s cultural. Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being something we visited and became somewhere we lived.
Wi-Fi became cheaper and popped up everywhere. We all bought into the smartphone idea and suddenly we had the whole internet in the palm of our hands, all day, and we disappeared into the virtual world.
Social media accelerated everything – suddenly conversations became shorter, attention spans reduced, so content had to become faster and more in your face.
During the pandemic, we were all forced online. For just over a year, it was hard to see our friends and colleagues in person, so we all joined in with the online facilities that were available from Facebook to Instagram to Zoom webinars.
For many businesses, going online stopped being an option and became a necessity almost overnight, and digital marketing exploded in every direction. Suddenly everyone was selling things online, and a whole new work from home industry presented itself to mothers who found themselves at home during the lockdown and realised that they didn’t necessarily want to go back to their offices afterwards. This was quickly followed by the industry of women teaching other women how to sell things online and make money from home, which persists to this day.
The marketing became faster, slicker and far more sophisticated, and before long, many women who started businesses seeking freedom, found themselves trapped on a treadmill of constant visibility.
I know because I experienced it myself.
The Rise of the Personal Brand
One of the strangest developments recently has been the expectation that ordinary people should present themselves as brands.
When I started blogging, people connected through ideas and experiences. Today there is enormous pressure to become a personality or influencer, to be visible constantly, sharing every aspect of your life.
For some people this works brilliantly. For others like me, it feels exhausting. I increasingly find myself wondering whether we have confused visibility with value.
Then Came Artificial Intelligence
And just as we were all getting used to social media, along came AI.
I find AI fascinating, in certain ways. I use it regularly for brainstorming, getting my ideas into a structure, and also for topping and tailing my spelling and grammar (because I’m hopeless at typing…)
But AI also feels like another turning point – for the first time, technology is not just helping us communicate, it is beginning to imitate us. It can generate images, clone voices, write articles, create whole personas.
That raises questions that previous generations never had to consider.
What parts of ourselves should remain human?
What happens when authenticity becomes optional?
What happens when reality becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from performance?
Twenty years ago, we worried about whether our photographs were flattering? Today people can create entirely new versions of themselves. That feels like a much bigger shift, and personally I don’t like it.
At the moment, I can usually tell when something is fake, and to be honest when I hear AI voices or see obvious AI-generated images and photos, it puts me right off, and I usually click away from what is being offered to me. But these things are getting better all the time, and I’m sure there will come a time when even I can’t tell the difference
I do not have all the answers. But I think these questions matter. For me the internet has always been a place for real connections with other humans, and I really don’t want to lose that.
What we Gained and What we Lost
When people talk about the internet, there is often pressure to choose a side.
Either everything was better in the past, or everything is better now.
The truth is more complicated. Ordinary people gained extraordinary opportunities, Knowledge became accessible, communities became global and we have access to stories, ideas and suggestions from people all over the world.
Small businesses flourished online, and women gained options that previous generations could barely imagine.
But we also lost some things.
We lost privacy. We lost some of the spontaneity that made early online communities feel so special, and perhaps we lost a little of our humanity along the way.
What Matters Now
The older I get, the less interested I am in chasing every new trend. What interests me now is figuring out which parts of the digital world are genuinely worth keeping.
The friendships, the real communities and most of the opportunities are worth keeping.
What I am less interested in is endless performance, endless comparison and the constant pressure to appear younger, richer, happier or more successful than you are.
If you have to present an image of yourself to the world that is not what your family and real friends see every day, then something has gone really wrong.
I spent years online while raising my children. Now they are grown up and I find myself looking at the internet through a very different lens.
The internet has changed dramatically since I first logged onto those parenting forums more than twenty years ago. Some of those changes have been wonderful, but others have been unsettling.
Most have been a mixture of both.
What remains unchanged is the reason many of us came online in the first place.
- We wanted connection.
- We wanted community.
- We wanted to learn from one another.
Perhaps that is why blogging still appeals to me. In a world that feels increasingly fast, artificial and performative, sitting down to write a thoughtful article still feels remarkably human.
And perhaps that is exactly what many of us are looking for again.
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