The Internet Used to Feel Bigger

When I was a kid, going on the internet was an activity.

Like, an actual activity. Something you made time for. Something you looked forward to. Something you eventually had to stop doing because your dad needed the computer.

My family had one computer that everyone shared. And that was it. No smartphones, tablets, or laptops lying around (at least until I was a teenager). If someone else was using the computer, well, tough luck. Wait your turn or whatever.

I think that made the time I spent online feel special. But lately I’ve been wondering if the internet itself felt different back then, or if I’m just getting old. Because the internet today is incomprehensibly bigger than the one I grew up with. More websites, more people, more things to do than I could’ve imagined as a kid.

And yet, somehow, it feels smaller.

Remember going online?

People used to be either online or offline. Like, that was an actual distinction.

I remember MySpace showing when someone was online. I’m pretty sure Yahoo Messenger and AIM did too. If someone wasn’t online, they just… weren’t. You’d catch them later. Nowadays, our phones are connected pretty much all the time, and apps like Slack and Teams are more interested in whether you’re active than whether you’re online. Are you paying attention? Are you available? Or are you pretending to be away because you don’t want to answer a message?

The internet used to be somewhere you went. Now it’s just… there. All the time.

And because people weren’t constantly online, you’d talk about the stuff you found there in real life. I remember kids at school telling me about websites or games, and then going home to try to find them myself.

Which brings me to a very specific, very vague childhood memory.

Internet Explorer (literally)

At some point in elementary school, a classmate (I think, but honestly, it could’ve been my cousin) told me about a Cartoon Network browser game.

I cannot, for the life of me, remember what it was called. It was a 2D, top-down game with a bunch of Cartoon Network characters, and I’m almost certain there was some randomization that made each playthrough different. I remember having an absolute blast playing it.

And that’s about all I’ve got, lol.

But what I remember almost as fondly as playing the game was trying to find it. I had this vague description and went home determined to track it down. I searched around, clicked through websites, followed links, and tried to figure out where the hell this thing was.

I had to be an Internet Explorer, if you will.

Sorry.

But seriously, it was fun. There was something almost mythological about knowing a game existed somewhere out there and having to figure out how to get to it. And while you were looking for one thing, you’d inevitably stumble across a bunch of other stuff.

Websites felt like actual places. They had their own personalities, layouts, and weird little design choices. Sometimes you’d find something that looked professionally made. Other times you’d land on a site that looked like somebody had discovered HTML the previous afternoon. And sometimes those were the coolest ones.

You’d open a website and have to figure out how the hell it worked. Sometimes I don’t think the person who made it knew either. Remember getting jumpscared by music autoplaying at full volume? Not every Flash-heavy website was a masterpiece, but at least you never really knew what you were getting into.

Even things that sound laughably unimpressive now felt huge. I remember discovering Google Images and realizing I could find more pictures of Pikachu than any kid could ever need. And then YouTube? Game over—the beginning of the end for dopamine receptors.

Maybe some of this was just new to me, not necessarily new to the world. But it felt like there was always another website, game, or weird little corner of the internet you hadn’t seen yet. And finding those things was half the fun.

When did we stop getting lost?

Imagine visiting a foreign city for the first time. Your phone’s dead, you don’t speak the language, but you can recognize just enough on the signs to sort of figure things out. You’re winging it. You take a wrong turn, end up somewhere interesting, and eventually work out how to get back.

Now imagine the same city with Google Maps. You know where to go, how long it’ll take, and where the nearest coffee shop is. You can navigate somewhere you’ve never been with almost complete confidence.

Which is great. I love Google Maps (if any of my friends read this, yes, I still hate Apple Maps). I’m not advocating for getting lost every time you leave the house. But exploring a place and navigating it aren’t quite the same thing. One involves figuring things out along the way. The other mostly involves following directions.

It’s kind of like that with the internet now. Except we’ve taken it a step further: we don’t even need to know where we want to go.

The Algorithm™

I don’t think I use the internet much differently than the average American. I use it for work, watch YouTube, stream shows, and doomscroll. Sometimes I catch myself wasting time, close an app, and then somehow open it again five minutes later.

And it’s all so easy. So comfortable. YouTube already has a homepage full of videos I’ll probably like. TikTok and Instagram barely bother asking what I want to see. I just scroll, and they figure it out for me.

The annoying part is that they’re pretty damn good at it. I’m not going to pretend recommendations have never helped me find something interesting. But there’s something a little unsettling about how rarely I have to decide what I’m looking for.

Obviously, recommendations aren’t new. Search engines have ranked results for decades. What’s changed is how good these platforms have gotten at keeping us inside them. If a company makes money from ads, it makes sense to keep people watching, reading, or scrolling for as long as possible.

Everything’s served on a silver platter. Actually, maybe force-fed is the better word.

And I’d be a hypocrite to act like I don’t enjoy the convenience.

I do.

The internet has become so good at giving us what we want that we’ve stopped having to look for it.

I tend to think about human behavior through an evolutionary biology lens, despite having absolutely no qualifications to do so. But curiosity had to be pretty useful to us long before the internet existed, right? That impulse to investigate something unfamiliar, figure out how it works, see what’s around the corner. It’s hard to imagine we’d have gotten very far without it.

So I wonder if there’s a difference between exercising curiosity and constantly having it satisfied for us. Looking for something means deciding what’s worth following, taking a few wrong turns, maybe ending up somewhere completely unrelated to what you started with. When you’re scrolling, the next thing has already been picked for you.

I’m not suggesting TikTok is making us devolve into some lesser species. I’m pretty sure that’s not how evolution works. But surely there’s some kind of tradeoff there?

And if a handful of apps can entertain you basically forever, why bother going anywhere else? I mean, I hardly do.

We used to be like Lewis and Clark, wandering around this enormous unfamiliar landscape, occasionally having absolutely no idea where we were. Now we’re living in our 200-square-foot studio apartments with an endless supply of stuff™ delivered right to the door.

Okay, maybe I’m just nostalgic

There’s one pretty obvious flaw in this whole argument: I was a kid.

Everything feels bigger when you’re a kid. Your neighborhood feels enormous. Summer vacation feels like it lasts forever. A random browser game can feel like the discovery of the century. Maybe I’m giving the old internet too much credit for what was really just being young and easily impressed.

And if I were growing up today, maybe I’d feel the same way about finding some weird Roblox game. Plus, it’s easy to romanticize inconvenience once you’re not dealing with it anymore. Would I actually want to go back to slow connections and Flash games that crashed for no reason? Absolutely not. I’d probably be annoyed within six minutes.

But nostalgia doesn’t explain what I do now. If I open my browser without a particular destination in mind, I end up on the same handful of websites. When I get bored, I don’t go looking for somewhere new. I just keep scrolling until something interesting comes to me.

It’s not like the weird corners of the internet disappeared. There are probably more of them now than ever. I just don’t visit them much anymore.

And the worst part is, I can’t even blame the platforms entirely. Nobody’s stopping me from exploring. I have more freedom to do it than I ever did as a kid sitting at the family computer. I’ve just gotten very comfortable not bothering.

I still wonder about that Cartoon Network game sometimes. I barely remember what you actually did in it, and I couldn’t tell you the name if my life depended on it.

I refuse to Google it or ask ChatGPT. That would be too easy… and that’s kind of what I’m saying.

I remember how much fun I had finding it when it wasn’t easy. I think that’s what I miss. Not necessarily the old internet, but the feeling that there was something out there and I had to go find it.

Which is funny, because there probably still is.

Maybe I should go looking.

honestly, tho…