The internet is a large part of daily life but even 21 years ago, it wasn't that important or that popular. Growing up in the 2000's meant that the internet was becoming more interesting and used more by people for fun and games rather than work or research. I didn't grow up with access to the internet, and never really used it until middle school, for several reasons.
My parents decided early on in their marriage to get rid of cable television, for their own reasons, and then decided against getting internet at home when it became available and affordable. Their reasoning was the same as those to get rid of cable along wih the fact that it was still a relatively new idea to have internet at home.
Instead of growing up playing games like Barbie dress up or the Sims or even being on MySpace, my family did a lot of things as a family. Our house was one that watched a lot of kids' movies and played board games, Mario Kart, or read many books that we either owned or borrowed from the library. We had a desktop computer that I could use for writing papers, playing games like spider solitaire, pinball or minesweeper and making pictures on Paint. The internet was something that I never really envied having until I had to start doing research papers for school.
The year my parents got smart phones, the year we got hotspots and a data plan changed the way our family worked. My mother joined Facebook, actually started using it quite a bit, and then let me make one. She was okay with getting on the internet for social media but was still worried about us being safe.
When my sister and I got smart phones, the data plan was enlarged and I was able to check out the things that I had always been curious about. YouTube was awesome and the discoveries of so many new artists and music genres that I had never listened to before.
Then, as I was just turning 18, my parents decided to get internet at home to "make it easier to not go over the data limit" as we so often came close to doing. That change seemed almost too late and yeah, I was a little salty about it being so close to my high school graduation when I wouldn't need it as much because I was going to be away at college.
Life at home changed in the last couple years as well. My dad loves his amazon prime account and the option to get Walmart to send their items directly to your house. The only time we go into the store is to get groceries that can't be shipped or things to pickup from Walmart that my dad purchased on the app. I've found myself using the internet so often, even for really mundane things like looking up definitions or schedules for movies and it reminds of the times when I would have had to find a dictionary or go to the mall and hope that the movie I wanted to see was playing soon.
Even now, the way I'm writing this article is a use of the internet I never thought I would actually be using. I've never thought of the internet as bad, but I've started to notice the impact it's had on society. Especially the way society clings onto the ease of access to any and all information available. It's becoming more of a bad thing to not have the ability to get onto the internet at any given time than to be distracted by receiving every possible notification or news whether it was relevant or not.
