Were people happier before the Internet was invented?

I always hear people talk about society’s “good old days” and such, but I’d really like to know when this mythical time period was, because when I look at our history I just don’t see evidence of it.

People were no happier nor sadder pre-internet. They just have more opportunities to share now.

This question has been asked in its many forms since mankind gained the ability to communicate non-verbally.

Ancient libraries were destroyed because religious-based forms of government considered them seditious.

Were people happier before books?
Were people happier before newspapers?
Were people happier before photography?
Were people happier before radio?
Were people happier before moving pictures?
Were people happier before TV?

It’s generational.
Believe it or not, something will supplant the internet, eventually – likely within your lifetime.

Negative opinions and social media only have as much effect upon them as people are willing to allow.

All these people popping off at each other on Twitter fights because they don’t stop to think before posting aren’t much different from people shooting off their mouth before the Internet.

It just didn’t happen as much long distance, mostly in person.

But miserable SOBs are going to still be miserable SOBs in any time and place Internet or not. The Internet doesn’t magically change people in some mysterious way. It just reveals what’s been there all along.

In that way it’s similar to alcohol. It is a disinhibitor. Many people were all shocked by the drunken ramblings and viewpoints of Mel Gibson.

Those anti semitic views he expressed were his views all along. He just usually had the good common sense to keep his mouth firmly shut about them.

The alcohol didn’t change him. It merely removed the inhibitions preventing him from revealing himself prior.

Likewise, social media, Twitter, and the Internet don’t essentially change people. It merely provides the platform to reveal their real selves. The anonymity acts similarly to the booze. Removes better judgement and inhibitions.

Happy people will still be happy regardless of the outer circumstances. Miserable people were miserable all along and the Internet merely provided a platform for it’s expression.

The Internet can only take over to the degree that the person allows it to.

Would you accept a restatement of your question? How about “Has the Internet contributed more positive or negative things to your life?”

Whether I like it or not (and I don’t), I have to admit that it has added more positive than negative things to my life. That’s on quantity, not quality.

However, if I were to tackle the impossible task of rating the actual and potential harm versus good that I can think of in the world and not just in my own sphere, I think the negative would come in much heavier. That’s because the potentially destructive force is unimaginably vast, whereas we got along very well without any of the benefits until just a few years ago.

It’s also because people of ill will are typically more focused and persistent than well-meaning people who just don’t believe things can really go as wrong as they do.

I think our cultivated dependence on it—and in fact our societal dependence on anything that plugs in—is likely to trap us in a very uncomfortable place.

Based on my experience, yes. I think people might have been happier still before home computers were invented and became so widespread and necessary for so many things. If I only had a dollar for every time I wanted to take a hammer and bash the damn thing into a million pieces!!!

Happier to talk in person, yes.
In person one takes in the frown or smile and a whole lot of other emotions that are not visable on the internet.
People are forgetting how to socialize and spell too.

Ignorance is bliss, but the internet can tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

Alternatively, it can hook you up with thousands of people who share your delusion and make you think everyone else is a freak and you’re the normal one.

It seems that the ones who revel in their ignorance to the point where they use the internet merely for confirmation bias are still relatively happy.

@ibstubro I think that’s already kind of happening.
First came using computers at work/school.
Next came having a computer in your home.
After that, we networked the computers. Okay, universities had been doing that for decades, but it wasn’t mainstream until about 20–25 years ago.
Then we sped up the computer networks to where you could grab a digital edition of the local newspaper, complete with images, in seconds instead of hours.
Currently, the big thing is having a networked computer in your pocket at all times.

As one who reads a bit of scifi and considers some of it speculative, I think that Google Glass was inevitable, and am rather surprised it didn’t gain traction. Then again, tablet PCs came out before the turn of the century yet didn’t really catch on until Apple worked their marketing magic, so it’s possible that they still will become common relatively soon.

Of course, they will likely be just another step towards totally ubiquitous computing, but we won’t get that far until we can do retinal implant displays and better neural interfaces on our way to eventually doing away with the whole audiovisual output and have the inforamtion just beamed right into our brain.

One thing to note is that hte real limits of computers are the input and output. Smartphones are the smallest thing that can be easily controlled by our hands and are on the low end of what our eyes can see well at a distance that is comfortable for using our hands (~18–24 inches). Once we figure out a decent, reliable way to ditch things like keyboards, mice, touchscreens, or anything else involving our hands, expect computers to really shrink and become far more common than they already are.

@kritiper That seems to he highly generational. I know few people over about 45 that like computers (most barely even tolerate them), and nearly nobody under 30 who dislikes/hates them. As for those in between, opinions are about as mixed as one would expect from those who grew up in a time of transition.

The question that comes to my mind is how are people going to handle going back to the circumstances where technology, the power it needs to operate, and various other factors are going to be unavailable. Purposely destroyed, weather/atmospheric changes, world conflicts, advanced tech that destroys or hinders, etc.? What are those who have never experienced being without going to do to keep their grey matter from spontaneous combustion?
Mad Max 52— Land of Personas Who Can’t Wear Hats.

@msh You forgot Escape from LA that ends with EMP-like satellites killing all electronics on Earth and knocking us back to the Stone Age.

Then again, that involved a lot of artistic license (“Hollywood magic”) since most older technology has no electronics while advanced electronics can be shielded against EMP. True, most civilian-grade systems aren’t so there would be a bit of disruption, but many things that were formerly cutting edge military/NASA technology trickle down.

For instance, 30 years ago a ~3-volt battery that could pack 2.5 amp-hours in something the size of your fist would be the sort of thing only armies and astronauts could afford. Nowadays, many people carry a battery with that much power/capacity in their pockets; the average smartphone battery is a 3.4V battery of around 2.2–3.8 amp-hours. Oh, and that battery shares a case with a computer more powerful than many room-sized mainframes of not so long ago, a decent camera, a “good enough for videoconferencing” camera, and a 4–7” color TV screen. How much do you think a current-gen smartphone that costs ~$500–700 would be worth 30 years ago? This might be a clue. And here we are in 2016 with those wonder-devices being cheap enough that billions of civilians not only have one, but think little of just throwing it away when a newer model comes out.

That trickle-down effect combined with a fear of the scenarios you envision means that wan can and have taken measures to protect against that sort of thing at least well enough to recover fairly quickly. I think that anything that would takes us down too far to bounce right back by adapting as we’ve done so many times before would kill enough people that things like electricity would be the least of our problems. Put another way, if the sky were raining down a flaming mix of sulfuric acid and cyanide, I’d have more pressing concerns than whether my phone has reception. If you’re ever in a position where you can afford to worry about electricity or radio/cellphone/GPS reception, you’re pretty well off.

Is that why people put electrical lines out to the front of the house to allow people to charge their phones in outrages due to catastrophically adverse conditions! Huhn.You might wish to get out of that rain, no? Also because people act so friendly during such times of mass trouble. I’m sure powering up personal items will be first on the list of almost everyone’s mind to get restored. Then there are going to be all those throwing themselves on the ground having temper tantrums. You are dealing with whole generations that cannot use anything but calculator to figure things out. Are you going to rely on such? En mass, I’d bet my money on the fifth horse at the races.

I believe this passage is apropos:

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

@msh You really have no idea who you are talking to, do you? Or does your nightmare scenario also include the extinction of every human over the age of ~20 as well as destruction of all of the knowledge we’ve recorded?

Then again, maybe the reason I’m uncharacteristically optimistic here is that I personally know how to make batteries and generators. Anything that screws with the laws of magnetism enough to stop that would likely kill us outright even though it wouldn’t really have any effect on chemical reactions.

Of course, I know enough about survival to know that food is more important than communications. Cloistered clergy and hermits can go decades without saying a word, but they usually don’t last more than a few days without food; even shorter if they don’t have access to clean water. How many people in Fury Road gave half a squirt of rat piss about recharging their phones? I’ll go out on a limb and guess that it’s fewer than the number who sought fuel for their combat vehicles, and far fewer than the number who just wanted a bit of water, preferably without too much fallout.

On the third hand, since you seem to think that recharging cellphones will be so high up on EEVVEERRYYBBOODDYY’SS list of priorities, it’s it’s possible that you can’t imagine any other way because you yourself are so tech-reliant that you would fall to pieces due to a lack of skills. Either that, or you place the odds of an attack using science that utterly violates everything 21st-century humanity knows about science while killing all of the intelligent humans far higher than I do.

TL:DR – Your nightmare scenario is utterly impossible barring some sort of alien/divine intervention that I don’t see happening outside of a Hollywood movie that is trying too hard.

jerv- I bow to your better knowledge in your forum, but that’s about it. Go find exceptions elsewhere. I believe what I do, you to yours. To each their own. And to thine own self be true.
However, odd, I didn’t try to belittle you in doing so. Amazing, that. Isn’t it?
Seems to be catching. Kinda like the stomach flu. Thank God I’m immune now. It must be in the jeans- er – genes. Oopsies!

Wow! That escalated quickly!

Back to the question, or at least closer to it, I have to say that the Internet is a Pandora’s Box in some ways. Man has sought ways to record and/or transmit information since before we figured out the whole “fire” thing. When the printing press allowed books to be made faster and easier than hand-writing every page, things started to change fast. Then came movable type that made it cheaper to print; no more carving out entire unchangable pages, just change the letters. Then telegraph, radio, yadayada until Internet.

Thing is, that sort of cultural evolution cannot be reversed without at least a few generations of strong commitment throughout the entire species to change combined with a brutal regime of repression beyond anything any human has ever managed before. We’re talking killing anyone who remembers any “forbidden knowledge”, burning all the libraries… basically doing things bad enough that the loss of the internet would be of relatively minor concern, assuming anyone even noticed amid the flames and rivers of blood and dying screams.

So there is no going back. Even if we tried to obliterate the internet and every trace of it’s existence, we’d just reinvent it again anyways.

What I find odd here is that much of what you describe seems to be a mostly American phenomenon despite there being at least 7 billion non-Americans on the planet, a larger percentage of which have internet access. Correlation is not causation; any unhappiness we have now isn’t because of the Internet.

Could it be that we are resentful of how we are oppressed and are seeking a scapegoat because we are afraid to lash out at the real cause of our unhappiness? I cannot say for certain, but given how many people use the ‘net without becoming ”...a bunch of judgemental followers rather than the self confident, interesting, unique people-loving individuals we were trying to be before the Internet took over.”, I’d say that misdirected blame is far more plausible than the internet leading to unhappiness.

Another possibility is that a large number of people suffer a form of mental breakdown due to information overload. Again, something that seems kind of American due to our busy, busy lifestyles that leave little time for anything but work; those who live where the pace is slower and the stress levels lower tend to be happier than those who are multitasking 50+ hours a week 51½ weeks a year for decades with no hope of retiring and a very real risk of falling without the sort of social safety nets you see elsewhere.

Of course, you may see the same sort of unhappiness wherever labor camps and genocide happen too, but the point is simply that correlation is not causation, and any rise in unhappiness is far more likely to be from other causes.

I agree with most of what you’re saying.I’ve also noticed a trend with teenagers committing suicide because of online bullying and people being recruited to terrorism online as well as how many young people have access to limitless amounts of porn via their phones. That can’t be healthy. The Internet is alot of fun and does have practical uses, but I have a feeling that overall it will prove to have been a bad idea.

@somewomenarenicemaybe Improvements in communications technology is truly a double-edged sword.

Look at how societies changed when we came up with written laws that the subjects could read; all of a sudden, the ruling class was more accountable and could no longer really get away with ruling by fiat. Look at how much science has advanced now that information that used to take years to spread can be distributed practically instantly.

But like many other things, the average person will use it for less-than-noble purposes. Maybe they’ll use their access to the sum of all human knowledge to binge-watch their favorite TV show. Or use the instant communication aspect to bully someone without all the hassles of confronting their victim face-to-face.

So, would you be willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Personally, I wouldn’t. At worst, all the Internet has really done is allowed humans to be what they are naturally. Getting rid of the internet won’t change the fact that some people are assholes. It won’t change the fact that guys like looking at naked women either; it’ll merely lead to a resurgence of the magazine and DVD porn.

Overall, it’s an evolution of humanity. Our intelligence will never increase as a species without information and a way to spread it, while we won’t be able to get more information without being a little more intelligent than our ancestors. It’s a feedback loop. So getting rid of the modern equivalent of a combined movable-type printing press and telegraph would set our species back far more than I feel it’s worth considering that we really aren’t doing anything we wouldn’t have done long ago.

IMO, if the internet is a bad idea, then so was humanity branching off from the other primates and becoming a separate species.

I don’t see the internet as natural at all. I guess I feel like technology is good to a point and then we start to hurt ourselves with it. I think the internet needs to be regulated better to be safe for kids and teens and I’m scared that radiation from smartphones really does cause cancer cells to grow, but we won’t truly understand the impact for another 30 years. I only love technology to an extent, but I never trust anything or anyone that makes a lot of money. Money is the root of all evil after all.

@somewomenarenicemaybe “Safe”? Most of the dangers you see are SO highly subjective that the best you can hope for by clinging to that argument is hoping that you don’t start a holy war… quite possibly literally.

Are women allowed to voice opinions? Will you be shot for saying something even the slightest bit derogatory towards any elected official? There are some who feel those are unsafe and should be banned from society.

As for the radiation, your argument there is precisely why I think the internet is a good thing. See, those who approach an issue with an open mind will seek out knowledge. Before the internet, it was considerably harder to do that, especially if the library in your town was small. Thanks to the internet, experts can share their findings faster, leading to studies being done quicker and for more peer review to corroborate or disprove findings. One could, if they so desired, find out the empirically proven objective truth. Stay with me here….

Not everyone goes to school to study things like RF radiation like I did, but anyone who asked a neutral question (as opposed to a loaded one) would be able to find out in seconds that cellphone “radiation” is RF (Radio Frequency) is non-ionizing and therefore not capable of causing the sort of DNA changes that would be required to induce cancer. You would also find that all of the reputable studies that have gone looking for a link but have yet to find one, leading them to agree that cellphones are probably safe. More precisely, they are about as close to outright saying that cellphones don’t cause cancer as they can get given the methodology available to the current state of science. Furthermore, one would see that cellphones are a moot point if you have ever been near a microwave, power line, CRT screen, wifi hotspot, or the surface of the Earth.

However, the flipside is that one is still free to ignore the weight of the evidence and can find far more “proof” that their position is correct regardless of the actual facts. The Anti-vaxxer movement is a shining example. When someone seeking truth looks at 1,000 studies and finds that 993 of them say vaccines are safe, 1 says they are not but is later retracted by the author, and the remaining 6 are plagiarisms of that retracted paper with “proof” that it’s all a conspiracy by [Obama/Islam/Elvis/whatever], they would go with the weight of the evidence. Anti-vaxxers, however, will cling to that one retracted paper as truth and say that they authors of the other 993 are paid corporate puppets.

The internet is neither good nor evil. It allows people to be what they naturally are, whether it be genuinely inquisitive or so biased that they will cite the most outlandish stuff to corroborate their own preconceived notions. But people have been doing that for millennia anyways; the internet really only makes it take far less effort.

Regarding the money side, you might want to take a look at the open source side of things. They tend to do some great work for nothing but passion for advancing and spreading technology. Sure, the Raspberry Pi is about $30 instead of free, but many companies would charge $50 and Apple would sell it for $180–200. Again, it’s amazing what a little research can turn up…. and how much faster and easier that research is when you have the internet.

My life had very few assholes in it before the internet. Yes, I was happier.

@dammitjanetfromvegas I would stipulate that there were always assholes and you just never knew it until the internet because you were isolated. That begs the question of whether hermits are happier than those who have enough contact with society to know JFK was shot, or whether the relationship between happiness and isolation is a bell curve, but I think I’ll wait for my morning cup of coffee to kick in before I do any thinking.

Hmm. I grew up in Las Vegas. Was raped at the age of 15 and again at the age of 20. I had many bad experiences with many other assholes. I’ve had my share of run-ins with assholes and I’m not a hermit. People I come across with irl are much less confrontational than those on the internet. That’s my experience.

I refuse to believe that the internet has actually turned people into assholes.

My belief is that we are just as screwed up as we ever were and are merely more open about it on the internet due to a perceived lack of consequences, in part from anonymity, and in part from the fact that it’s impossible to punch someone in the face over the internet the way saying some of the things people say would get them knocked out in face-to-face communication.

Pre-internet, if some whackjob had a crazy idea, their message would die out largely unhears. Nowadays the same crazy idea will be seen by billions and bring the other whackjobs out of the woodwork. They were already there all along, but they didn’t expose themselves nearly as much.

As usual, society hasn’t fully adapted to this newfound capability as it came about rather abruptly rather abruptly rather than over the course of many generations. Technological evolution is far faster than societal or or biological evolution. And if you think we’re having problems now, technological evolution is accelerating; it wouldn’t be terribly far off to say that we discovered more in the last century than we did in the entire millennia before.

The real problem isn’t the Internet; it’s Humanity’s ability and willingness to at least try to keep up with the fact that the world is changing. There will always be those who feel that the old ways are better simply because they refuse to adapt.

Then again, looking at the rest of the world, including places more connected to the internet than Americans are, I’m thinking that it’s really more of problem with our society and the internet just makes a good scapegoat. It’s almost as though many parts of the world are more advanced and enlightened than we are….