30 years of Internet

A question came up in an LGM subthread a couple of days ago, which was when did people in general start using the internet exactly? This doesn’t have an exact answer it turns out, but after a little internet research I think a roughly accurate answer is that in 1994 very few people were on the internet, and by 1997 the vast majority of non-geriatric college-educated people were on it regularly, so September 1, 1995 is a good birthday more or less.

Here’s an article from the fall of 1993 by Robert Wright in The New Republic discussing what the the thing is, and asserting that a year before the reader probably hadn’t even heard the word while now it was being used in New Yorker cartoons. Wright has some interesting things to say about where the whole thing is going, although like pretty much everybody else in his business he underestimated the extent to which it would devastate print journalism.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss how the internet has changed your life, now that it’s been around for 30 years. This assumes that the average age of an LGM commenter is about 60, since if you’re under say 43 or so it has been around “forever.” [ETA: Many commenters have pointed out that this is an overstatement. Under 33 would be more realistic, while people much under 25 don’t remember a world in which social media and smart phones weren’t ubiquitous, which are two related innovations that are each probably as significant as the internet itself.] This makes me think of about how people in 1980 who were born in 1920 must have thought of life as Before TV and After in a similar way, while for those of us born in 1960 TV had always just been part of basic reality.

In another generation the internet will be like that too, but for now lots of us can remember the Before Time, if just barely.