Jenny mentioned a class experiment documented in The New Yorker, 1992 House. (As an aside, how do you tell which New Yorker pieces are fiction? This one isn’t by Seymour M. Hersh. Do kids these days call Old Phones “landlines”? Do they really know how to use a semi-colon? It’s lacking a certain verisimilitude we expect from our ignorant youth.)
Anyway, this graf does contain a telling difference between then and now.
I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. At first, I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were not in widespread use back then; there were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry.
Which would you give up: your phone, or your Internet access?
Would give up my phone in a heart-beat. Never my Internet access. (Fortunately, I was already online in ’92 so this isn’t a hypothetical…)