This blog post was inspired by this piece by Isabel Brooks in The Guardian:
Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew?
Reading Brooks piece on growing up just before the internet became a way of life, I felt a strong pang of recognition. I’m part of that small and slightly haunted generation sometimes labelled xennials – old enough to remember dial-up tones and landline phones, but young enough to have adapted to smartphones and streaming. It’s not quite nostalgia I feel when I look back, but a kind of reverence for a world where everything wasn’t so immediate.
That’s why, for me, the ache isn’t for the pre-internet world. It’s for the pre-social media world. The world before we were expected to perform ourselves constantly, before everything we did needed to be witnessed to feel real.
In 1999, I moved to New York City as a student. New city, new country, new continent. There was no Instagram to scout out potential friends or TikTok to show what kind of person I was. No swipe-based apps to filter people into categories. Making connections was harder by today’s standards – but also deeper. You met people through shared spaces, not shared hashtags. You had to show up in person, not just in pixels. The friendships I made that summer – formed over late-night conversations, record shop excursions, and mismatched pub crawls – are friendships that have lasted 25 years.
The public-facing web was still ridiculously new. Social media, as we know it, didn’t exist. Instead, there were Usenet newsgroups, BBS forums, and IRC chats: mostly text-based, minimalist, and utterly devoid of filters and curated feeds. You had to imagine who someone was based on their tone, not their aesthetic.
By 2001, I’d moved to California and my music career was starting to take off. Again, there was no social media strategy to consider. Blogs weren’t really a thing yet. If I wanted to advertise a gig, I printed flyers and taped them to lampposts. My “mailing list” was a literal, physical list – names, landline numbers, maybe an address if I was lucky. I’d go down that list, calling people one by one: “Hey, I’m playing at Java Joe’s this weekend. Come along if you can.” It was time-consuming. Inefficient, by today’s standards. But there was joy in that work. It made the connections feel earned, not engineered.
And of course, there was no streaming. Music came through speakers, not screens. You found new bands through word of mouth or staff picks at the local record store, not a recommendation engine trained on your data. Albums lived in CD cases or cassette sleeves. Watching a film meant renting a VHS or catching a scheduled TV slot. It all made you value what you consumed more deeply. You couldn’t scroll past it. You had to be with it.
What all of this boils down to, I think, is value. Culture used to be something we discovered, not something pushed at us endlessly on tap. And because there was less of it, or it took more effort to find, we appreciated it more. We lived more slowly with it.
Social interaction feels the same way. Now, connections come quickly – maybe too quickly. We “add” people without knowing them. We like posts without remembering them. It’s socialising at the speed of dopamine. But it doesn’t always linger. And it doesn’t always nourish.
That said, I don’t want to sound like I’m railing against modern life. There is value in what came next. When I moved back to London a few years later, “Web 2.0” was starting to take shape. Facebook had emerged. YouTube was gaining traction. And suddenly I had a way to stay in contact with those same people I’d met in the early years—the friends I’d made in that golden pre-social media window. Without these platforms, those connections might have slowly faded. So I don’t deny that social media has its place.
But I do feel deeply lucky that my formative years came just before it became the default. I learned to be social in the real world first. I made mistakes in private. I formed my identity without feeling the need to package it. I had space to grow without an audience.
So yes, like the writer of the Guardian piece, I look back sometimes and feel something stir. But it’s not a yearning for cassette tapes or clunky websites. It’s a longing for a time when curiosity didn’t have to be performative, when culture took time to find and space to breathe, and when being a person didn’t mean being a profile.
I don’t miss the pre-internet age because I never knew it.
I miss it because I did know it.
I miss the pre-performance world.
The London Druid 