Ask Lemmy

I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.

It did not used to be like this.

A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.

The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.

The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year university students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their university campuses. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.

And that's just college freshmen.

Internet access today is more universally-available. I'd say that it's just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.

A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist

a professional dedicated to writing

and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you're reading is often without that filter. It's not that people in society changed. It's that you'd never seen society's writing; you'd just been reading what experts put out.

It'd be like most of what you'd seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.

I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking "good God, these are terrible". Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:

https://xkcd.com/202/

https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fyoutube.png

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The answer, of course, isn't that YouTube users are unusual. It's that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you're used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you'd been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.

Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don't work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it's pretty shocking.

I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn't as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn't merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn't necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they'd been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarial_pool

A secretarial pool or typing pool is a group of secretaries working at a company available to assist any executive without a permanently assigned secretary. These groups have been reduced or eliminated where executives have been assigned responsibility for writing their own letters and other secretarial work.

After the widespread adoption of the typewriter but before the photocopier and personal computer, pools of typists were needed by large companies to produce documents from handwritten manuscripts, re-type documents that had been edited, type documents from audio recordings, or to type copies of documents.

Is all this a bad thing?

Well...the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It's got pros and cons. It's changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it's easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn't have a filter on it that might have been useful.

I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I'd wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It's just that you're seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe's writing than Jane the Journalist's writing than you might have in 1995.