Before the Internet

Why does this bother me you might wonder?

Firstly, because I am a widow. I know—intimately, painfully, what that kind of loss feels like. Grief is not theoretical to me; it is lived. And while no two widows walk the same path, there is a shared language of shock, disorientation, and survival that binds us. I cannot presume to know every detail of how Erika Kirk is feeling, but I do understand the landscape she is suddenly forced to navigate.

Second, it bothers me because much of the criticism directed at her has been, frankly, obnoxious. Disagreement is one thing; dehumanising is another. Erika has been labelled with some deeply derogatory terms, words designed not only to critique her ideas but to diminish her character. There is something unsettling about watching a woman endure public bereavement while simultaneously being dissected, mocked, and reduced to caricature. You do not have to agree with someone’s politics to grant them basic decency. Grief should not become a spectator sport.

Were People Kinder Before the Internet?

It’s a question that feels heavier than it first appears. Before the internet handed everyone the power to dissect a person or a situation through the lens of someone else’s opinion, were we happier? Were we smarter? Were we kinder?

We have to be careful as there is a real temptation to romanticise the “before internet.” What do I mean by before? Come on, you know. Before Wi-Fi passwords, before continual scrolling, before read receipts, and before an opinion travelled faster than a fact. Before lies travelled faster than truth, because let’s face it, they do.

‘Before’ was a time when silence was just that – silence, not an absence of notifications. ‘Before’ was when being unreachable meant you were out, not offensive. ‘Before’ was when time off felt like time off. ‘Before’ was a time when conversation was normal as opposed to screens. Was that really a better time? Or was it just that we didn’t know any better?

There is a strong temptation to say yes. To picture a pre-digital world where disagreements were civil, children played outside without comparing themselves to filtered perfection, and insults weren’t hurled from behind anonymous profiles. We imagine handwritten letters, neighbourly chats over fences, community halls full of conversation instead of people bent over glowing screens. But nostalgia is a skilled editor. It softens the harsh edges.

Before the internet, cruelty still existed. Bullying happened in school corridors, not comment sections. Gossip travelled by telephone instead of trending hashtags. Prejudice was spoken openly in rooms where no one recorded it. People were excluded, shamed, silenced—just without a digital footprint. So, if cruelty was already there, what changed?

The Amplifier Effect

The internet did not invent unkindness. It amplified something that was already in the world, made it more visible. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, allow words to travel instantly and widely. A cutting remark that might once have reached ten people can now reach ten thousand. The scale is different. The permanence is different. The speed is relentless. And anonymity changes behaviour. When we cannot see the face of the person we are speaking to, empathy weakens. Eye contact has a civilising effect. A screen does not.

Before the internet, if you insulted someone, you often had to witness their reaction. Now, cruelty can be delivered and abandoned within seconds. But amplification works both ways.

Acts of kindness also travel further. Fundraisers for strangers can raise thousands overnight. Communities rally around the sick, the grieving, the struggling. Support groups form across continents. Compassion can be mobilised at scale in ways previous generations could not imagine.

So, are we less kind—or just louder?

The Loss of Friction

In the past, communication had friction. You had to dial a phone. Write a letter. Arrange a meeting. That friction created pause. And pause can protect kindness. The internet removed that pause. Anger can now be expressed instantly. A moment of irritation becomes a public statement. Algorithms reward outrage because outrage generates engagement. Engagement generates profit. Companies like Meta Platforms and Google operate systems designed to keep us scrolling, reacting, responding. The faster we respond, the less we reflect. Kindness often requires reflection. Before the internet, you might cool down before speaking. Now, the “send” button is quicker than wisdom.

Prejudice and harmful attitudes

It is worth asking: was unkindness simply less visible before the internet? Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice were often more socially acceptable in decades past. They were spoken openly in workplaces and homes. There were fewer consequences, fewer public challenges. Today, harmful attitudes are more likely to be called out. That can feel noisy, even hostile. But visibility is not the same as increased cruelty. Sometimes it is increased accountability.

The internet exposes what was once whispered. And exposure can feel like decline, even if it is actually illumination.

Childhood: Was it Simpler or Just Different?

Perhaps the sharpest ache of nostalgia concerns childhood. Children once played outdoors until streetlights flickered on. Arguments were resolved face-to-face. Embarrassment faded with distance. Today’s children grow up in digital ecosystems. Friendships unfold through group chats. Bullying can follow them home. Validation is measured in likes. Identity is curated. However, rates of anxiety and depression among young people have risen in many countries since the advent of smartphones and social media. Correlation is not causation, but the conversation is urgent.

Yet today’s children are also more globally aware. They can access educational tools, creative platforms, and communities of support that earlier generations lacked. A teenager questioning identity can find solidarity online rather than isolation. So, were children better off before? Or merely shielded by ignorance?

Digital Empathy

Research suggests that constant exposure to online conflict can desensitise us. When outrage is everywhere, compassion can fatigue. Tragedies blur into headlines. Suffering becomes content. But the internet has also made us more aware of global suffering. Before, we might not have known about disasters across the world. Now we see them in real time. Awareness can foster empathy. The question becomes not whether we are kinder—but whether we are overwhelmed.

Compassion requires energy. The internet delivers an endless stream of people in need. No one can respond to all of it. So sometimes we respond to none. That can look like indifference.

The Performance of Kindness

Another shift is the visibility of kindness itself. Online, kindness can be performative. Public declarations of support, carefully worded solidarity posts, visible donations. Before the internet, kindness was often private. A meal left at a doorstep. A cheque mailed quietly. A conversation held in confidence.

Now, kindness can be measured in likes and shares.

Does that make it less genuine? Sometimes. But sometimes visibility encourages others to act. Public generosity can inspire collective generosity. The motivation may be mixed. The outcome can still be good.

Every generation had the best times…or did they?

Every generation believes it had the best of times, although I will always argue fiercely for generation X and the 80s! When the telephone arrived in the world, the general consensus was that real conversation was gone and the art of letter writing was soon to be a lost art. Real conversation stayed. But then the television arrived, ready to rot brain cells and destroy lives and communities. We survived.

Then came the internet. We didn’t know what to expect. Access came to the general public and suddenly information was at your fingertips. No more hunting out your grandads Encyclopaedia Brittanica to look up the answer to your question! We summoned the information with a few clicks. Those clicks felt powerful.

Old friends, New Connections

Connecting with people before the internet was a different process. It was deeper and more personal. You met your friend or relative face to face. You would sit with them and talk, being able to respond not only to what they said, but their body language too. You wrote letters to each other. You phoned a friend and could hear their tone of voice, and laughter through the phone.

Since the internet, a relationship is quite often controlled through a screen. We remember a birthday because Facebook reminded us. We don’t send birthday cards now; we send a Facebook message or email. We send sympathy messages with an appropriate emoji. We follow many people yet know few.

Connection was promised across social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and Instagram. They certainly delivered. Personally speaking, my connection to family 16,000km away is easier, although cultivated. Connection on social media doesn’t show the rawness of a face-to-face connection. Social media gives you the opportunity to share news and photographs instantly. Old friends can be found with a name and a search bar. Marginalised communities can gather in solidarity.

But as connection widened, the span of attention fractured. We are now a community, a race, who is reachable 24 hours a day, and yet loneliness continues to climb. You can be in a room full of people and be incredibly lonely. We are visible and unseen at the same time.

Before the internet, your social circle was smaller, but it was anchored in proximity. It had to do with who went to your school or workplace, who lived in your locality and how often you got together. Now, the social circle can span continents. So, were we better? Or just geographically limited before the internet?

Attention: The Most Valuable Currency

If there is one undeniable shift since the internet joined the world, it is the commercialisation of attention. Before the internet, distractions existed. We would watch television, listen to a radio, gossip with a friend over coffee, but it had a finishing point. Programmes ended. Newspapers were folded away. Shops closed. The internet does not have that finishing point. It never closes.

There are endless streaming services. ‘Regularly scheduled programming’ is now replaced with Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Hulu, and many of the others that offer endless choice. News cycles refresh by the minute offering up to date information. Emails arrive 24/7 leaving no space to switch off. There is always one more video, one more article, one more notification, just one more scroll……

The human brain is not designed for continual stimulation. Excessive screen time is increasingly linked to anxiety, sleep disruptions, and reduced concentration. Think of the generations of today. They are navigating developmental landscapes that we couldn’t even imagine from our own childhoods.

Before the internet, boredom was common. It was uncomfortable. It was also fertile. Boredom breeds imagination. It forces reflection. Now, boredom can be and is, extinguished within seconds. Were we better? Or simply bored enough to think?

Knowledge: Credible or Conspiracy

Chaos and greatness. That’s the internet in a nutshell. It is the greatest library of information ever created. Online platforms for education, academia databases, and digital archives have made learning accessible in ways unimaginable thirty years ago. A youngster in a rural town of Australia, can watch lectures from Harvard University in the United States of America. A patient can research rare medical conditions without waiting for a specialist appointment. Activists can document injustice in real time. This is not trivial progress.

But with the accessibility of the credible information comes the misinformation and conspiracy theories. Expertise competes with opinion. Authority is questioned online. Yes, sometimes that can be right. But often it is reckless. Before the internet, misinformation did exist. It just spread more slowly! The trouble with the world wide web is that falsehoods and conspiracies can circle the globe before you have even got out of bed. The challenge is not access to information—it is whether we have the ability to judge it well.

Were we better before? Or simply less exposed?

Privacy: The Casualty of the Internet

Remember when your diary had a tiny brass lock and a key? When photographs were slipped into albums with sticky plastic film, and the worst that could happen was a blurry thumb in the corner? When mistakes faded not because they were erased, but because memory, mercifully, softened their edges?

There was a time when privacy was the default, not a setting buried three menus deep.

Today, with the rise of the web and the ever-present camera phone, our lives exist as an archived jumble of messages, opinions, and images—stored on servers, suspended in clouds, catalogued across social media. Nothing is misplaced; nothing truly disappears. A thoughtless comment typed at midnight. A photograph uploaded in haste. A version of ourselves we barely recognise a decade later. All retrievable. All searchable.

Corporations map our preferences with unsettling precision. Algorithms anticipate our behaviour before we do. Data has become currency, and we spend it casually. We trade convenience for surveillance without reading the terms and conditions—because who has the time? Free email, free storage, free connection. The cost is simply ourselves.

How many times have we seen a social media post from ten years ago resurrected and dissected as though it were written yesterday? Context evaporates. Growth is ignored. We judge swiftly, forgetting that we, too, have digital fossils buried somewhere in the sediment of the internet.

Companies like Google and Meta Platforms know more about our habits than some of our closest friends. They know when we wake, what we search, what we linger over, what we abandon halfway through. They know our curiosities, our fears, our impulsive purchases at 2 a.m. Convenience is seductive; frictionless life feels efficient. But efficiency has a witness.

Before the internet, anonymity was easier. You could move to a new town and begin again. Your past did not arrive ahead of you via search engine results. Reinvention required courage, not digital housekeeping. Mistakes were local, not global. They travelled by gossip, not by hyperlink.

Now, forgetting is a privilege. The right to be unrecorded, untagged, unsearchable—this has become rare. Even silence is suspicious. An absence online can appear as an omission to be explained.

And yet, perhaps we romanticise the past. Privacy then was not always protection. Secrets could suffocate as much as they could shield. The difference is scale. Our lives were once contained within communities; now they are distributed across platforms. Once, we chose what to reveal. Now, disclosure is ambient.

Were we better? Or simply less documented?

Opportunity: The Great Equaliser?

Before the internet, publishing, broadcasting, and even public voice were controlled to a degree. If you were not approved by an editor, a producer, or an institution, your words often went unheard. The internet dismantled many of those gates.

Writers can self-publish. Artists can share globally. Small businesses can compete with larger corporations. Crowdfunding can turn ideas into reality. Marginalised voices can bypass traditional barriers.

Movements such as #MeToo gained global traction because stories could be shared instantly and collectively. Awareness campaigns, grassroots organising, and citizen journalism have reshaped political landscapes.

Before the internet, power was centralised. Now, it is dispersed—though not evenly.

Were we better before? Or simply more controlled?

Work: Flexible or Inescapable?

Before the internet, work had clearer boundaries. You left the office and, in many professions, work stayed there. Today, emails and messaging apps blur those boundaries. Remote work—accelerated dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic—relies entirely on digital infrastructure. Platforms such as Zoom transformed kitchen tables into boardrooms.

For some, this flexibility has been liberating. Parents can attend school events. Commuting time has decreased. Geographic barriers have dissolved. For others, work has become omnipresent. The line between professional and personal life is porous. Burnout looms. Before the internet, work was less flexible but more contained. Were we better? Or simply less reachable?

Human Nature

The internet did not change human nature. It amplified it. Kindness travels faster. So does cruelty. Knowledge spreads. So does ignorance. Communities form. Echo chambers harden. Love letters can be sent in seconds. So can threats. We are the same species that wrote poetry, waged wars, fell in love, and betrayed one another long before a modem ever whirred into life. The internet is a mirror—sometimes flattering, often unforgiving. Strip away the technology, and we are the same creatures we have always been—capable of tenderness and cruelty in equal measure. The internet did not remove kindness from humanity. It removed the barriers that once limited expression. It shortened the distance between impulse and action.

If anything, it has revealed us more clearly. When someone behaves cruelly online, it is not because the internet created cruelty. It is because the internet removed the consequences that once restrained it. And when someone behaves generously online, it is not because the internet invented kindness. It is because the internet made generosity visible.

Were we better people Before the internet?

Before the internet, life was slower, less documented, more local. After the internet, life is faster, more connected, more exposed. Better is not a fixed state; it is a choice. We can choose to use technology deliberately rather than compulsively. We can log off. We can teach digital literacy. We can protect privacy. We can resist outrage as entertainment. The internet is neither villain nor saviour. It is infrastructure.

What we were before the internet was limited. What we are now is powerful—and overwhelmed.

The more useful question is not “Were we better before the internet?” but “How can we be better with it?”

Because there is no going back to dial-up tones and encyclopaedias on the shelf. The world has shifted. The cables are laid. The satellites orbit silently above us. The past feels simpler because it is complete. The present feels chaotic because we are inside it.

Were we better before the internet? Maybe we were quieter. Maybe we were more patient. Maybe we were just waiting for something that would change everything. And then it did.

Were people kinder before the internet? Maybe it felt that way because cruelty travelled shorter distances. Now it travels at the speed of light.

The real question is not whether we were kinder then. It is whether we choose to be kinder now—despite the speed, despite the noise, despite the temptation to react instead of reflect.

Technology did not change the human heart. It just handed it a microphone.