I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew.
Dude, read a book. What the fuck?
I don't have a smartphone and am happy to answer any other questions.
Cell phones didn't become commonplace until I was in my teens. Before that, we were free! If someone didn't show up when they were supposed to and they didn't answer their home phone we just assumed they were dead and then moved on with our lives. If your car broke down, you sat on the side of the road with your sunshade inside-out and it had a message that asked people to call for help. Presidential Shootings were much more common place. Shoplifting was way easier because there were so few cameras. MTV played music videos!
Before smart phones I carried a book everywhere I went and would pull it out at any point I'd generally reach for my phone now. I also got lost driving a lot.
I've met many zoomers who just stopped using a smartphone for several months or years. Myself being one. It's not that hard. Boomers need to put their ipad down for once.
Give me your downbears all you like: If you’re not old enough to remember having to call friends up using a landline to try and organize anything or just talk, it is nearly impossible to comprehend how much this sucks compared to group chats and texting. Making phone calls suck and I’m so glad I never have to do it anymore.
A lot of stuff has been said so I won't repeat them, here's a weird one though - I don't know what americans experienced so this might be weird to those people but here on terf island a phenomenon that's not often discussed it that back in the day if you wanted to look at porn you could go for a walk in your local patch of woods. Pre-internet there were piles of porn mags in every patch of woods in the country.
EDIT: Aww fuck "forest porn" is lower in the comments.
We still remember the ancient ways. If you separate an old from the internet for a few minutes, you can make them recall, though cutting someone off from the internet is torture under the Geneva Conventions.
I remember getting in trouble reading books and pen spinning instead of paying attention in elementary school rather than doing the same with my phone in highschool
Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc
idk elder millennials were children pre-internet, their experience isn't going to be the same as gen x or boomers who were adults by the time the internet became so ubiquitous. By the year 2000 there was ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger and texting and Unreal Tournament with online matchmaking. So maybe you werent playing Roblox on your iPad while waiting for your Pizza Hut but you could go home and frag some noobs after eating garlic sticks till you puke in the non-smoking section.
my brain deleted all my archives of playing gameboys (or those weird plastic single-game things), carrying an analog book to IRL read when not home, begging my mom to let me goto the rollerrink, the tall man in the forest, reading MAGAzines, huddling a 22" for the latest episode of whatever weekly shitcom, the phone cable not being long enough to chat outside the kitchen, pogs was before my time but I definitely would have dated a diamond league pog champion, finding a quarter and buying a soda with it, teachers doing nothing about that little shit jeff yanking my hair, doodling in a notebook made from treepulp.
There was that sweet time before GPS was commercially real for people but the internet was becoming common where you put locations in mapquest and printed out a sheet of directions.
If you couldn't read a map you were kind of fucked. I didn't get a cell phone until I was a junior in high school. I knew my area VERY VERY well when we were growing up cause you were fuckin lost otherwise and we were always roaming around smoking weed and doing dumb shit.
Some folks I know nowadays who always had GPS have no fucking idea where ANYTHING is or what the name of anything is. People who lived here their entire lives and can't get to the closest town without GPS. Its crazy lol
When I was young I just read novels for fun; that's it. If I didn't know something, I'd try and look it up on my father's digital encyclopedia, but obviously it still didn't know everything. If I didn't know something though it was fine, you don't have to know everything.
Before cellphones you had to guess which building the person was in and call that, instead of just calling the person. Or you could leave a voicemail at their house and they'd maybe get back to you at some point in the next week or so.
If it was an emergency and you couldn't get them, you'd call everyone you could think of who was in the general area of where they might have been, and send them out to look for them.
I think this isn't something specific to the internet and smart phones, it's just the sheer ubiquity and convenience make existing without them unfathomable despite plenty of people in the world living without it, like electricity or running water.
I once met a friend coming from another direction at a radiohead concert by bringing a mylar balloon.
In another incident, friends got married at City Hall and invited a crew to celebrate afterwards, but I flubbed the directions to the initial meet-up point and then missed all the festivities.
partly might be because nobody entered the 2020-internet all at once, and 2000s "internet era" was sort of similar to 90s "non-internet era"
1998 was roughly the year that average Americans started getting internet
I remember that era and it was basically the same as before for any elementary school kid, except in addition to going outside and playing gameboy, you'd also play some games on web browsers
research without google: My first report using google was in elementary school in 1999, and it was just a "supplement" to the already-available physical books we had. This pattern continued well into the 2000s, with the internet only becoming the main source of information (at least in schools) near the late 2000s.
aspects of the internet gradually became more like today--RAM got cheaper, HDD capacities increased, dial-up gave way to DSL/cable etc, and this took several years. As all of these things happened, software became more and more bloated to take advantage of the extra resources
Lot more downtime. I didn't really know vintage computers were an actual valid hobby i could have until the mid '00s, so I didn't really have many friends. Still don't, outside of those hobbyist circles.
The internet's also the only reason I can actually speak to people who aren't other Americans, too, and since I don't really like other Americans much that makes it kind of nice. It's like a glimpse into a life where i can be more well traveled.