For younger generations, what was it like growing up with the internet?
For younger generations, what was it like growing up with the internet?
I guess I'm curious about generations (namely GenZ and Alpha) who didn't live in a pre-Internet time. Like,
- How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?
- Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library or university — one search away? That it's absolutely insane you can engage in a real-time conversation with someone on the opposite side of the world? That you can find niche communities in an instant?
- Were your parents super strict about internet usage? How quickly did you find workarounds?
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Gen Z (2006) here, I definitely grew up with the internet since I was born after it became mainstream for the public. Before learning about the internet I was restricted to an iPod which I got when I was a little older than 5 years old which was restricted to a few games, ones of those were minecraft. My only exposure to the internet at the time was going to my grandmas where I would watch minecraft videos on her TV or play games on her laptop. This is when I first grasped the concept of the internet, in which I didn't see it as an information library at the time but more so easy fun since I wasn't "really" on the internet. I was like 10 when I started using social media, but even then most of it was just YouTube and later Reddit.
I'm pretty impressed by the collection of knowledge the internet has, it's definitely a step up from the community library I went to when I was a kid but now I only go so often. More so in my early teenage years I mostly used the internet for communication since I was mainly on mainstream social media platforms. Nowadays, I mostly use less mainstream platforms because I was blind to how corporate and monetized the internet was for the past two decades. I also use archive.org a lot to watch anime, movies, and read pdfs since I don't have to pay for the real thing. The internet does have an upside, and I would say my favorite part of the internet is its convenience. As for my internet usage, my parent's didn't really care, lol.