What is the internet to you?
Responses might vary, but at this point in time, most of us view the internet as a resource that’s necessary to do work, stay in touch, go shopping and just generally live life.
But let’s go back 20-odd years to the ’90s. It was a simpler time.
Back in the day, the internet was a new thing.
If you’re old enough, you remember the sound your modem made. You remember a time before Google and before social media; a time when all there really was to do was go on chatrooms.
Was it a series of tubes ? Was it an information superhighway ?
Or was it just a passing fad?
Twitter’s been having fun with old-timey internet predictions.
Matthew Ball, who used to work at Amazon Studios, correctly pointed out what the internet has become.
It led Twitter down a rabbit hole of what people thought the internet would become, and let’s just say that these predictions have aged poorly.
The internet: just a fax machine, basically.
I don’t know why so many predictions confidently stated that the internet was just a passing fad.
Even when it was slow and people didn’t know quite what to do with it, it was full of potential.
Good one.
In the 2020s, it’s hard to imagine a time when a print newspaper would clown on the concept of the internet.
The Sun still exists, but the same can not be said for many of its contemporaries.
And how is Macy’s doing?
Amazon, in case you haven’t been paying attention, has basically taken over the world. Macy’s, on the other hand, is closing hundreds of stores at a time, many of them in dead or dying malls.
The thing about predictions? Sometimes they’re wrong.
There was a time when the internet was kind of a toy, something you’d use from time to time. Now, it’s all around us at all times. If it did collapse, we’d be in trouble.
Bad predictions aren’t limited to the ’90s.
Maybe you can refresh my memory. Did people really say the 2020 election was the ‘first post-internet campaign’?
Are kids logging off en masse so they can discuss things in person rather than on social media?
No way, Norway.
I love how, even in Norwegian, the headline is easy to decipher. I have to give props to the author, though, for admitting that he was wrong.
Bold predictions about nascent technology are never a good idea.
We’ve been getting stuff wrong for a long, long time.
Hilariously, this New York Times headline from December 8, 1903 was printed literally nine days before the Wright brothers proved that human flight was possible.
If this prediction was accurate, we’d still be 999,882 years away from inventing airplanes.
Sometimes, predictions are right.
This article doesn’t predict the internet-fuelled smartphone boom that came half a century later, but it does get the broad strokes right. It might have been talking about landlines, but still, the main point of its headline is technically correct.
This should be a lesson to all of us.
Internet stuff aside, this whole discussion is a lesson in what can happen when you make a bold prediction.
Sometimes, you’ll be proven right. But it seems more likely that you’ll be proven wrong, so perhaps the wait and see approach is best for all.
Let us know about your early internet memories in the comments!
