What’s Your Internet Generation?
In recent years, there’s been so much discussion about the differences (and battles) between generations – gen z vs millennials, millennials, and gen z vs boomers, everyone forgetting about gen x… But to a lot of us, these discussions have rung a little false, and not just because they’re pretty much all manufactured clickbait. A big thing that’s often left out of these discussions is the influence of one’s online generation – that is, the era in which one became a regular user of the internet. In today’s always online world that might sound kind of funny, but the internet has gone through a lot of changes in its short life.
Unlike typical generational groupings, which are decided by birth year, online generations are more about access. As access to the internet began to expand, getting online wasn’t about your age so much as your literal ability to have a device that could connect to it. Take 90s kids whose parents had to get a home pc for work becoming “very online” at the same time as adults who had an internet cafe open in their neighborhood; or in the 2010s, elderly people finally giving in and getting online to see pictures of their grandkids at the same time as some kids were getting their first smartphones.
Now that the internet is such a huge part of many people’s lives, one’s online generation can sometimes feel like it has a greater effect on who and what you relate to, your understanding of technology, and even what you think the internet should be. So today we want to take a quick dive into each of the major online generations and look at how when we hopped online might shape us just as much as what generation we were born into.
The Different Online Generations Explained
In the same way that age-based generations are marked by shared memories and events, online generations too have their own features, turning points, and memories.
The Inventors: It’s hard to imagine a world without it now, but it actually wasn’t that long ago that the internet was just a dream. The groundwork for online connectivity was laid in the 1960s, with the Advanced Research Project Agency of the US Department of Defense creating one of the first networks to implement the internet protocol suite, ARPANET, which was announced as operational in 1971. For many years, the internet was mostly just used by governments and scientists to send information to one another. While the limited access meant that most people didn’t get to use the internet at the time, it was still a point of curiosity for many.
The Early Adopters: The late ‘80s saw the first electronic cafes open around the world, and then by the mid-’90s internet cafes started popping up. This was also when commercial internet began allowing people to bring the internet into their homes (if they could afford a computer…) For most people, the internet was just for emails and occasionally looking up information on AltaVista or AskJeeves. But a smaller number were part of the first group to start forming identities and communities online, building the social foundation of the internet as we know it. Through personal websites and shared forums, people now had the opportunity to create a new, online version of themselves and share their interests and hobbies with people around the world. There was also generally a need to understand the basics of how the internet worked and how to code as people were often building these websites and forums themselves. In the media, ‘computer people’ were often portrayed as either elite hackers or basement-dwelling weirdos (or both,) but by the end of the decade, more and more people from all walks of life started connecting online.
The 00s Gen: Post Y2K, being too online was still seen as dweeby, but more large-scale at-home access saw more people going online more often. The adoption by adults continued steadily, but there was also a spike in young people getting online as now there were many new instant messengers and places to hang out virtually popping up that made finding and connecting with others much more simple. A slew of diary sites had also begun popping up in the late 90s and by the early 2000s were everywhere, with people using screen name aliases to spill out their every thought and feeling to strangers. There was such a wide variety of places to interact and connect, people were often a part of multiple communities across many sites. And each one would often have its own set of internal rules and guidelines, checks and balances, inside jokes, and kooky characters. This era certainly had its fair share of drama, but unlike today, if a site owner or admin threw a tantrum and ruined everything, it was just that one site affected, not a huge section of the internet. And the communities could also work together to attempt to suss out hoaxes or other bad actors due to their shared histories and understanding. Though to be clear, the internet was definitely still used for nefarious purposes sometimes, even back then.
Some people certainly had no problem connecting their online personas to their real selves, but most people would continue to keep their real life and online lives separated to some degree. With the rise of social sites like MySpace, Friendster, and later Facebook, where the focus was on curating a desirable image for both your real-life friends and anyone else who might come across your page, the path towards the melding of the online and real-world personas began. But at this point there was still a level of separation allowed by the sheer number of options – you could attempt to be your coolest self on MySpace while nerding out over video game minutiae in a chatroom, while also following every move of your favorite band on their dedicated forum, all without any of those streams ever crossing.
The Social Wave: As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, however, those options started to get more and more limited. The last era saw the birth of the major social media players that are still around today, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, who would then begin a new era of cannibalizing similar sites in their quest to be the only option. More “regular” people that would have never previously seen themselves as “very online” started logging in a lot. Facebook changing from only allowing signups from students with .edu emails to letting everyone on shook up the internet. Parents and grandparents and kids and everyone’s friends were all of a sudden posting on the same site. It became more normalized to share all of yourself in one place, attached to your real name and photo – your feelings, failures, rants, stanning… everything shared with everyone. And people began to realize that once you put something online, it was there forever.
Types of internet celebrities started popping up in the 2000s, but the 2010s were when lots of people really started to see real-world fame from their online posting. People got their fifteen minutes through their blogs, YouTube channels, and Instagram posts – and this seemingly easy path to success drew in more and more people trying to replicate it, curating their entire lives in the real world in the hopes of achieving online success.
The time of joining small internet communities, learning the ropes, and creating your own individual space separate from your real life was starting to erode – now everyone was screaming into the same few voids. For people who had been online for a long time, this could feel odd – because it was bringing together multiple often very different sides of oneself, but also just from a personal security standpoint. Whereas the newly online never even really gave any thought as to why they might not want to put their full face, name, address, and every single thing that they’re doing online for all to see, all of the time, at every second of the day.
The permanent digital footprint and constant connectedness paired with a growing need to find an outlet for frustration has also led to online interactions becoming a lot meaner. We can see this when X, formerly known as Twitter, ends up with a new ‘character of the day’, or when TikTok chooses to mob some random person for any perceived slight. At the drop of a hat, thousands of people will descend on one target, not even needing confirmation that they’ve done anything wrong before firing off hateful videos or tweets in an attempt to take the person down. One notable example was TikTok melting down because they felt that a guy wasn’t excited enough in a 19-second clip of his girlfriend surprising him. The video shot up to over 60 million views and he was dubbed “Couch Guy.” Comments and reaction videos started pouring in accusing him of cheating and being a terrible boyfriend… but none of it was true. In an article for Slate, he noted, “I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”” The large-scale interconnectedness we now have without any sort of safeguards or moderation has, over the course of this era, led to more and more instances of public bullying of innocent people.
The siloing of the internet didn’t just affect our social interactions but also our access to information. Whereas in the ‘90s and ‘00s there were a plethora of websites hosting useful information (that, of course, had to be double-checked for accuracy, but were often written by people who were genuinely knowledgeable and just wanted to share what they knew) and a variety of search engines to use to find them, by the 2010s Google had come to essentially dominate internet search, which gave it and its algorithm control over what everyone could and couldn’t find. As always, people have found workarounds, but it has also had the unfortunate result of pushing people who are already primed to believe whatever they see online towards websites deliberately filled with misinformation that have gamed the system.
Future Internet Generations
This all sounds like a bit of a downer, but all is not lost! One of the most positive aspects of online generations is that they show that cross-generational communication and empathy is possible. Pre-social-silo, people of all ages were hanging out on forums and in chat rooms, sharing their thoughts and interests without these huge chasms between generations that people like to pretend exist now. Of course, when you were born is going to affect what you know and how you see the world, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t relate to other people from different generations.
The innovators brought their vision of a connected world to life, the early adopters laid the foundation for everything that would come next, the 00s Gen expanded the web beyond what anyone had imagined (for better and worse,) and the social wave saw a huge increase in global interconnectedness and communication. The internet has become such a major part of everyday life for so many people, and when and how we engage with it can affect so much about our everyday lives. This video obviously barely even scratches the surface of everything that each online generation encompasses, but it’s interesting to begin to think about the way these things not only shape us, but connect us in interesting ways.
Now we should take this forward, and create an even better internet by combining this openness to share across generations with our modern social safeguarding (because we can definitely leave behind things like everyone pretending to be 16/F/Cali on AIM and other more nefarious happenings that slipped through the cracks in older internet days.) We can learn lessons from our past and create an internet where people feel free to share things they care about but don’t feel compelled to share their entire self and life all of the time, and where you can form communities that don’t feel like cults, and that isn’t just owned by the same three companies.
Every online generation played an important role in building the internet, and the world, into what it is today – so now we should all work together to create a new, better next generation before all of its promise and possibility slips away..