Once again I’ve been thinking about a really fascinating topic, namely, how technology has affected our lives in the past years 25 years. What do we do differently now as opposed to then? Turns out, just about everything that affects our day-to-lives.

It’s a topic that resonates with me because when the Internet and World Wide Web blazed across everyone’s horizons starting in about 1995, I was 44 and had never even had a computer. The sum total of my experience was a year at a newsppaer using a small, boxy Apple Macintoshword-processor-type computer . I forget what model it was, but I loved it. Still, I didn’t get my first computer, an Apple Performa, until 1996.

I’ll never forget that night. It was a cool Spring evening in March. I nervously marched into Office Depot to select and purchase the Performa model I had already picked out, loaded it in the back seat of my car, and drove home with a feeling of escalating anticipation and nervousness. I walked into my apartment that fateful night under a starry sky full of portents. Would life ever be the same again? And more mundanely, how would I ever install all the software and get Internet, and have it all up and running in under a week?

It actually took me three days to get it all set up. I took my time and savored each step that was completed without major glitches. And Macs are easy to set up. Imagine if I had had a Windows machine back then?

When I first saw Netscape 1.2 come up and load a page, I was flabbergasted. I had accessed the Internet at work, but this was at home. I was in awe. I felt something seismic happening in my life as I read news online and started furiously surfing the Web. I never looked back: e-mail, IMing, writing personal essays at online diary sites (blog precursors) reading news on a computer screen instead of in a broadsheet printed newspaper, exploring countless fun and entertaining sites, endless Alta Vista and then Google searches, non-stop learning as new worlds of information opened up in cyberspace. But the best thing of all, it turns out, was the ability to communicate with people all over the country and the world. This would have seemed purely the stuff of science fiction prior to 1995, for me anyway.

There’s now a sense of life pre-Internet and post-Internet. In that other life before I had heard of the World Wide Web (isn’t it an ironic name?), I had much more time to myself. Too much, but I had my books and TV and walks. In the mornings, I’d have breakfast and take time to read the paper or a chapter in a favorite book, on my bed, with soft music in the background before I left for work. There were no fingers flying over keyboards typing e-mails or instant messages, or URLs. No staring at icons on a desktop or playing streaming audio music or mp3 files. No endless hours of online diary, blog, and journal reading and noteleaving.

Life with the Internet, the technology that has most significantly impacted everyone’s life since the end of the last century, has changed daily routines and habits of thinking and reading, dramatically. Researchers are probing how the Internet has actually altered our neural pathways and changed the way our brains process, store and retrieve information.

I fear, though, that the time spent on the Internet will only increase as we continue to watch movies and listen to music, and get all our news there, and continue to write e-mails, have Zoom conferences, and chat and talk and buy plane tickets and books and the latest electronic gadgets and devices — all online, on and on, one or a few clicks does it all. What can’t be bought online? Imagine how that has changed people’s buying and browsing habits.

It’s hard to pull away and take out a book. It’s hard sometimes to get out and take a long walk or get some fresh air. The Internet is all-encompassing. And I don’t think that was the way it was supposed to be. It’s beginning to take on sci-fi and furturistic trappings, especially as virtual reality and the concept of the metaverse increasingly take hold.

Reading on my iPhone screen is so natural now. Most of what I read is on my phone. Picking up a book and reading and making notations seems increasingly novel and deeply “old school” but tell that to my hundreds of books in bookshelves and stacked on the floor.

Communicating via the Internet — it seems like second nature. As using the telephone once was, today we’re using our phones for everything. After all, they are advanced, handheld mini-computers. Where are we going with this? One thing’s for sure. There is no going back.

I’m looking at a matted print I bought at the store a while back and it shows an old roll-top desk in a room with a globe on a stand, an old electric fan, and a light hanging down from the ceiling. Letters are stuffed in the compartments of the desk. Paper! Letters! Those marvelous things we used to get in our non-electronic mailboxes. When is the last time you received a letter in the mail? A handwritten one at that? A timeless feeling and a lost era, that’s what the scene reminds me of.

I remember once when I received a package from a dear friend. In it was a letter written in beautiful calligraphy, with a lustrous blue ink on fine writing paper. I turned the paper over an examined it. It felt so substantial and long-lasting. What a startling thing to behold. A vestige from the past when things were done much more slowly and deliberately. It was truly a great gift.

I miss those days sometimes. But not enough, and that worries me.

The Way We Were