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I used Usenet and anonymous FTP, archie and gopher, in the days just before the creation of the web. I actually thought the web was weird when my ISP started trying to push it, and couldn't really understand why they were making such a big deal about it and taking so much trouble to explain to me all the things I'd have to do to get hooked up with it (which were significant). It seemed like just a bunch of weird-looking pages and not all that useful. Weird bomb-making recipes in text files from anonymous FTP seemed a lot better.
CompuServe had a very different feel as opposed to the community-run places like FidoNet and Usenet. It always sort of felt like a Dollar General version of the internet, where all the shelves are a little disordered and no one's really paying that much attention to what's going on. Usenet and FTP were very cool. There was wild stuff on there.
Getting access to email was very cool. Before that it was sending letters, or talking on the phone with family members or random strangers walking around hearing you. Getting a physical letter from someone you were distantly-connected to was very cool in a way that's not replicated on any electronic network, and email seemed initially like it was better, although I think now that in letters we lost something important.
Probably the most massive difference between now and those days is something I don't see people talk about very much: Before the internet, there really was only 1 viewpoint and 1 viewpoint only on the news. US soldiers were the good guys. Neoliberals in government are looking out for you. Criminals are bad. It's just... it's hard to explain, because now there's such a wealth of different opinions and ways of looking at things that it seems normal, but back then it was very rare to get your hands on even one little piece of "subversive" viewpoint. When the Rodney King beating made the news, it was really electrifyingly shocking; at least to the white world, the idea that the cops would ever do something wrong or could even be charged with a crime was aberrant and confusing. They found the cops not guilty in the first trial. It was just too much to take on, to change the jury's world view around to that they might have done something illegal, even with the whole thing on video.
I got an issue of Adbusters and it was like this wild precious thing, an artifact from some other world. I was visiting somewhere when I found it; it wasn't available in my hometown. On the early internet, I was reading a message board where some people were talking about tactics fighting against NATO troops, and it was fucking mind blowing. Like... they're the enemy. How can they be allowed on the internet? Like people? And then I started downloading episodes of "Off the Hook" and issues of 2600, and it sort of was this gateway into this whole other way of looking at the world. I read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and around that time this whole other type of media came along, and in about 5-10 years it became, silently but inexorably, an acceptable thing. But when I was growing up, it wasn't.
It's not gonna be possible, I think, for someone from today to really understand how blinkered the view was of the world for 99% of people, before the internet came along. I don't know how well it will translate to today, but I remember Spin as another big watershed at the time, in showing me how much fakeness was in a lot of what I thought was real.
Absolutely, though it went beyond the news. Culture in general was much more monolithic. You could start a conversation with any random person about the previous evening's episode of Gunsmoke or MASH or Cheers and there was a very good chance they had watched it. It's hard to overstate how much more diverse culture has become in the Internet era, for better and for worse.
That’s interesting - I didn’t experience the advent of the internet like that, probably because I’m from a fairly multicultural background and travelled at lot at that time. I lived near DC for a few months in 1976 and went on a three-week road trip around California in 1990 and did notice how isolated from the rest of the world Americans in general seemed, especially outside the big cities. I was a real novelty, exotic even, and I’m a white cis het woman. Just with a funny accent, from a country they’d never heard of.
I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.
They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.
When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)