Another student on the TU100 Facebook group alerted me to this YouTube video, featuring a clean-cut looking American family talking about how they’ve recently got the internet for their home, and how much the kids are enjoying it. Aside from the US-type cheesiness – and a slight scepticism that surfing timetables are likely to be all that son Peter tries to look up – I didn’t find too much to wonder at in it (and it served to remind me of the one-time existence of Netscape Navigator).
This video though - Teens React to 90s Internet - featuring contemporary teenagers watching and commenting on the earlier video, shows how integrated the internet has become that it’s no longer viewed as ‘a thing’. One girl comments at time 0:56, “This is a commercial for the internet?”. As one who can remember the early 1990s, this seems reasonable in context – though it doesn’t need to be as cheesy as it is – but presumably to these young people, seeing what’s essentially an ad for the internet is a bit like seeing an advertisement for electricity. (“Hey, Dad recently got electricity for our house, and we just can’t stop switching the lights on and off. It’s so much better than the oil lamp …”).
One, presumably young, YouTube commenter left the following, which seems to have got a large number of likes:
But of course email in the early 1990s wasn't like that. Even if people had an email address they didn't check it all the time and you didn't get emails on your mobile. You probably would need to call to let someone know you were on email.
By the time one of the teens in the question time at the end comments “It was SO old!” about the video’s production, I’m losing patience with them a bit, but that no doubt just reflects my age (loosely, mid-40s ...). One of the lads comments “The internet is self-explanatory” – but when it first started to come into homes, it wasn’t. Towards the end, one of the girls is asked “Do you remember the first time you used the internet?” She responds “I actually don’t, cause I’ve been using it my whole life.”
But then it turns out these kids don’t actually know what a
modem is. So in a way, were the 90s kids actually more clued up about the
mechanics of how you get connected to the net? Today’s teens just expect to be
connected and don’t give a thought to how. That's not really a criticism; I don't give a thought to how electric light works either, or hot water - I just expect to have them.