internet – The London Druid

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.

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