Internet Nostalgia
Posted: Wednesday 14 September, 2011
Colin Miller
It’s hard to remember not using the Internet, it has become such an integral part of our day-to-day routine, not just for business and emails but for almost anything you can imagine. If you have a question you don’t know the answer to, you Google it, if you remember a song you like, you download it. Everything you can think of, or have an interest in can be accessed in an instant and barely a second thought is given to the process.
Having all of these capabilities in a mobile format means that using the Internet becomes an even more organic experience, which can occur anywhere at any time. It wasn’t always like this.
Take a moment to think back to when you first started using the Internet, back when a "fast" connection was a 56kbps dial up modem and you could download a whole song in merely a number of hours. Making the decision to either use the Internet, or have the capability to make a phone call from your landline was a genuine choice to make on a daily basis. Paying by the minute for the service and listening to the dial-up tone every time you connected was all part of the experience.
Using the Internet used to be an occasion, it was a premeditated decision to go online and connect to the outside world. The promise of all the world's knowledge available to you on one painfully slow web page after another was almost too much to comprehend.
There was a time when a successful download of any file, no matter how large or small was a cause for celebration. Just the other day I downloaded an entire album of high quality MP3 files, which I firstly used an audio recognition app to identify and then link me to the content, all while I was in a shop… on my phone! This is not a shocking fact nowadays, but when you take a moment to think back to how it used to be not so long ago, it does seem a little more impressive.
