When the Internet Changed Everything (for real this time)
The gradual, then sudden internet revolution, starring nineties Luddites, digital immigrants, electronic magazines, and insufferable bores with humanities degrees
It took 2,500 years for Civilization as history knows it to emerge.1 It took 131 years for the shifts of the Protestant Reformation to take hold.2 The Scientific Revolution was 144 years.3 The Enlightenment was 152 years.4 Even the abrupt changes of the Industrial Revolution spanned 80 years.5
Change takes time, especially major changes that shift entire countries, continents, and the world. Out of nowhere and shocking, the violent and bloody French Revolution still took an entire decade, even as sudden as it felt at the time.6
There is only one revolution that has been faster, and it also came out of nowhere. The Internet Revolution.
GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY
The internet itself as a technology gradually emerged in small pockets over a long period of time. But I believe the internet revolution happened much more suddenly over five or six years. In 1995, only 14 percent of American adults had ever, even one time in their lives, been on the internet. By 2000, half of the U.S. Population were on the internet. In the early 2000s it quickly became clear that most anything and everything could and eventually would involve the internet.
As an example, I entered college in 1992, almost none of my friends and none of my professors had email addresses. When I graduated in 1996, all of them did and it became the gold standard for staying in touch with everyone. And by gold standard I mean a universally accepted, effective, and proven technique that was promptly abandoned for unknown reasons later, in this case with the advent of pervasive social media and messaging apps a decade later. In this article I want to talk about the internet revolution, which in a way is the story of the 1990s, especially the latter half of the decade.
The internet didn't change daily life for most people till the 2000s. And of course the internet had been emerging long before 1995. But those five years were when the most people jumped online all at once representing most people's first experience in cyberspace, and yes, that's the corny word we called it back then.7
The Hemmingway character Mike is asked the question "How did you go bankrupt?" Mike answers, "Two ways: gradually, then suddenly."
A lot of things change this way, but the internet followed this pattern even more, which is true of most things with the internet. Can you find it on the internet? The answer is always yes, and even more.
I grew up in a family of early adopters of computer technology. Growing up, I thought that computers would change everything. But the technology that changed everything in my lifetime was not the computer. It was the internet.
Chuck Klosterman wrote a terrific book called, The Nineties, which I recommend to anyone who looks back fondly on that decade, or who is from Generation X (who are not know exactly as those that look at anything all that fondly). He observes that while conservative estimates say human beings shows up 70,000 years ago, the wheel was not invented till 3500 BC. He quips, "That's a long time for people to not notice that rocks roll down hills."8 But of course, Klosterman clarifies, the invention of the wheel is not about rolling rocks. The innovation of the wheel was really the invention of the axis. It's the way round rocks roll for any practical purpose. The way we get things done is more important than the abstract idea of them happening.
The internet ended up being the axis to the wheel of the computer. It became the way we got things done. It was not entirely obvious to most people what the practical purpose for computers until the internet.
THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING (BUT, LIKE, ACTUALLY THIS TIME)
I first accessed the internet in 1991, or rather, my Dad did it, and I sat next to him in a folding chair. I would graduate from High School that next year. At the time the internet was a primitive thing most hadn't heard of, and almost nobody had been on. One might say the idea the World Wide Web wasn't even a fully formed idea in the 1980s until Tim Berners-Lee introduced the concept of a “distributed hypertext system” in 1989 which, conceptually, was an ever-expanding network in a cobweb design.
My Dad got on our family computer at a hulking oak desk in our living room. From his records I have, I know we dialed up on a 14.4 kbps connection, and you couldn't use the phone at the same time. As a result of a IRL pre-arranged rendezvous if it all worked out, we got on a message board with our neighbor. The sky opened and a miracle took place because our 300 baud connection worked. My Dad typed something on the screen and the neighbor saw it, and he typed something back and we saw it. Both disconnected and immediately called up on the landline phone once it was freed up. I remember the first thing my Dad said to our neighbor: "This will change everything."
He was right. A year later AOL went public and in 1993, AOL started physically mailing compact discs to homes to help them get online. By 1995 there were 1 million subscribers to AOL. My family had joined before that (as I recall, we were part of the first 500,000 subscribers) and I had my first email address about half-way through college.9
Before his untimely death, my father wrote a secret memoir that he has only allowed our family to read. In it he He describes the origin of his "Tuesday Column" email list which was basically a weekly article about church leadership issues:10
“Once I got email, I immediately started the 'Tuesday Column' which I sent by [what was then spelled] ‘E-Mail’ starting with only the 17 Wesleyan ministers who had email addresses at the time. But 1995 was the explosive year for the Internet and by Christmas, 1995 I had more than 1000 email ‘subscribers’ several hundred Wesleyans, [and] the rest from a variety of denominations that found out about “this guy on the internet who writes a religious column every week for free.” - Keith Drury
As I think back to those days of Dad typing out a weekly email newsletter, I realized with some pause that while this was very early in the history of the internet, it is similar in structure to this Substack and all the others in most ways. And perhaps by now you've figured out why for the last year I've sent my free articles out on Tuesdays. It's in honor of the passing of Keith Drury.
NINETIES LUDDITES and DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS
My wife Kathy and I were dating back in 1995, but it was a long distance relationship. We wrote some snail-mail letters to each other, but it was not long till I convinced her we should email each other. Her Dad had a computer from his work at home, so she asked him to get a modem for it. He thought that was a senseless purchase.11 "We don't need that," he said, "You can pay for it yourself." So she did pay for it, and we emailed back and forth to each other--and were married just a half-a-year later. Thanks Modem! Ironically, it was not long before her Dad was using that modem all the time for work and even a few of his own websites for his drag racing side-business/hobby.
I don't mean to pick on my father-in-law about this. Luddites made quite the comeback in the mid-nineties, and his opinion was a common one. In a meeting where putting curriculum for my denomination online in the mid-nineties, one of our top leaders proclaimed for everyone: “The internet is a temporary fad—it won’t even be here in a year.” In another contemporary example, the year after I left college, my father went to be a professor at the school I just left. He wrote in his memoir:12
"When I went to IWU in 1996 only one of the Religion Division faculty had even been on the Internet (Wilbur Williams, and he had only been there once.)"
Just to clarify, that means precisely none of the intelligent professors I studied under used the internet at all. None of those those wizened sages with PhDs who wrote journal articles and books and worked every day with 18-22 year olds had ever thought: ya know, I should be online for my work. I came and left from college and the internet had nothing to do it with it for most everyone there.
But it does make sense now as I recall it. Back in the early 80s, I had erroneously though that computers would change everything. But computers didn't change a whole lot for most people. In those days computers were more like high-tech typewriter replacement devices.
I do remember that "losing a paper" was a pretty common occurrence for us typewriter-replacement level computer users. We didn't think to save documents every paragraph. And you had to save to floppy disks or the other smaller hard case disks if the computer was borrowed or at the library or computer lab. This caused me to develop some paranoia around losing work over the next 10 years, so I would often save a document with an excessively detailed title with a date and time like "Comparing and Contrasting the Ancient Near Eastern Ethics of Joshua and Judges - 1996.11.4-2:10." I would have literally dozens of save files for the same document.13
In The End of Absence, Michael Harris talks of those of us in this bridge generation making all kinds of tech mistakes along the way, being the first to come of age while learning computers and the internet. He wrote, "if we're the last people in history to know life before the Internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After." He continues, "If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the Internet and without."
I’ve asserted before that I am in a small subset of people born in the early 70s that could claim to be the First Digital Natives. But if we are the First Digital Natives, the rest of those generally around my age, who didn't grow up with computers in their daily lives until the mid to late 80s or early or mid-90s, are perhaps the Last Analog Natives. Harris describes their plight:
"Those of us in this straddle generation, with one foot in the digital pond and the other on the shore, are experiencing a strange suffering as we acclimatize. We are the digital immigrants, and like all immigrants, we don't always find the new world welcoming." - Michael Harris
There is no digital immigrant story quite as unwelcoming as those born in the 70s and 80s with a horror story to tell about losing the best paper they ever wrote in High School or University. To hear them tell it, if they hadn't lost that one genius paper they'd probably be teaching at Harvard or Yale right now.
EMAILING, EMERGENT AIRQUOTES, and ELECTRONIC MAGAZINES
The next part of my internet story feels a bit unique and special to me. Like the self-understanding of most Gen Xers, hipsters, grunge rockers, alt culture freaks, punks, and emergent conversationalists, my story is not actually unique at all it's just me trying to present myself as unique. It's like the best T-shirt ever made in the history of western civilization, which reads "JESUS LOVES YOU... " (and then in smaller letters, it continues) "...but then again, he loves everybody; so don't get a big head about it."
After moving to the Boston area for grad school I began to fashion myself as a kind-of-writer-of-some-sort. That's at least the first time I took myself seriously as a writer, perhaps at times too seriously, which is in some ways the definition of a writer: one who takes themselves too seriously. This identity emerged in two ways, the first is fairly facile, the second is somewhat professional.
The first thing I did was to write emails to several of my college friends who had moved all about the country after graduation. I had come to think of email as the most effective and efficient way to stay connected with people, and even when I traveled about I stayed connected to email, which was unheard of in that day. As I retold in the article "Most Interesting Machine" found here, I sent emails at pay phones for a season. This was a overlap in technology eras that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Along the way what I was writing my friends started to almost feel like articles and "think-pieces" and because they were to my closest friends I was brutally honest, silly, strange, grandiose, and extreme. Of course as one of my readers you may think I am still more or less all of those things. Meanwhile, at the time I was cobbling together a way of looking at the world, and a bit of a writing voice. I was also struggling with a more intellectual process of losing much of my faith all while experiencing major disappointment from a few Christian leaders who were personal mentors who let me (and many others) down big-time. I've written some about those episodes elsewhere, but haven't told the whole story. For now, know that I was writing my friends online a lot, in a bunch of stuff I’m glad is lost to the last millennium.14
The second thing I did was to start writing articles in 1996 for online magazines and websites. This is a much longer story about what later became known as the "emerging church conversation." But I was one of the weirdos who was in those proto-emergent alternative worship conversations. Many of these conversations were happening in online forums at first, and then more officially at the "Next-Wave" electronic magazine where I wrote a regular series of articles for in my own name and also under a pen name. And yes, we called them "electronic magazines" back in the 90s, or an e-zine, for short. I can almost hear my daughters rolling their eyes reading that sentence.
So I was not only early to that emerging conversation thing, I was early to online writing.15 Less than 1 in 5 Americans had ever accessed the internet at that point, but I was already releasing articles during the first Clinton administration. While this may come off as braggy I do want to just emphasize that most everything I wrote was utter and complete garbage and at times unreadable. I’m so very glad close to none of those articles are online in any form now, and doubly glad I wrote a lot under pen names too. The internet of the 1990s felt like a very temporary thing, and for that I’m grateful.
WEBSITES, SELF-DOXING, and INSUFFERABLE BORES WITH HUMANITIES DEGREES
As the late 90s passed by and more and more people started to move online, but it was in no way pervasive or expected. My wife and I planted our first church in 1998 (one of those weird emerging churches) and we had an email address for the church but at that point we had no website, and I don’t remember anyone ever asking us if we had one—as in not one person. It is hard to imagine now, but for public businesses, being listed in the yellow pages, and even paying hard cash monthly for an ad in the yellow pages, was far more important in every way than having a website in the late 90s. And as Klosterman amusingly points out, most private Americans routinely "doxed themselves" back then by putting their name, phone number, and even their address in the phone book.16 You had to pay extra to not be listed in the phone book.17
All this would change quite quickly, and we created a website for my second church plant in the year 2000 as the expectations had already begun to shift. Within no time I had my own personal "blog," you know, back when every insufferable bore like me with a humanities degree also had a blog. I started the Lakeshore Writers Society and was writing pretty regularly for my site. Eventually I owned the domains to dozens of websites, and I had to learn to code some rudimentary HTML to keep some of that stuff rolling. Later on Blogspot and then Wordpress and dozens of tools made all that much easier and few of us mortals ever accessed the true code "back end" of anything ever again.
I won't go much past the early 2000s, because again I think 1995-2001 was the big shift. At the first part of that run, almost nobody had been on the internet. By 2000, about half of us had, and it would accelerate from there to this day, when our modem app tells me that 36 different devices of all kinds in my house alone are currently accessing the internet at all times for their functions. This includes computers, machines, appliances, thermostats, watches, talking speakers, monitors, cameras, and perhaps several things I don’t even know about that my family members have purchased, plugged in, and given a password to. Computers may have changed the way that we did term papers, but truly the internet changed everything, for real this time.
I've mentioned Klosterman's The Nineties book multiple times here. But I must highlight yet another observation he made to close. He reviews the mundane triviality found in newspapers and on television news on September 10th, 2001, a day where not much happened, all of which was reported in the early hours of September 11th, when one of the most terrible and consequential events of our era arrived mid-morning via planes hitting the World Trade Center. While many things changed after 9/11, it just may be that it also included a monumental shift in the way we view the world that corresponded with the new Age of the Internet that the Internet Revolution of 1996-2001 ushered in. Of September 10th, 2001, Klosterman says:
"No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn't have to have an opinion and nobody cared if you did or not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd." - Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties
Yes, the internet changed everything gradually, then suddenly.
How about you? When did you first access the internet? Did you ever lose a paper because you didn't save it properly back in the old days? Do you remember getting an AOL compact disk in the mail? Will you confess to having read internet e-zines and using bulletin boards with a fake name?
Yes, I confess to being "rabble rouser" for an underground church website as we approached a major denominational meeting. But Jim and Brett actually put me up to it. HAHA!
Fun article. I remember the AOL disk, losing papers, double-printing papers to ensure not losing my work, and charging Mickey exorbitant amounts of $$ for test study pages. (He funded my dating life.)
I was an early adopter -- not as early as your family, but pretty early for sure. I remember making fun of a guy in class who carried a laptop (Fritch?) because he was the ONLY one. All while harboring a massive Apple desktop and printer in my tiny dorm room.