1. Wasn’t really explained. My mom had a desktop computer in the 2000s though, and was happy enough to let me mess around on it. I think most of my learning was from videogame tutorials.

2. I am absolutely aware, growing up with access to the entire collective human experience is batshit insane. I’m glad that I mostly abstained from the social media craze, but just the sheer amount of noise the Internet generates can be overwhelming.

3. My mother was incredibly distant, and my father wasn’t around, so I had very, very few limiters on my internet access. I feel pretty strongly that this was a mistake, as being raised by the internet in the manner I was led to me really struggling to connect with people and empathize with them, vs just trying to exploit and scam strangers.

As for just general anecdotes…trying to even comprehend the world before the internet is really hard for me. It might as well be the Dark Ages, compared to what came after. Where I work was still using typewriters through the 90s, and only recently started using email in the 2010s, and it boggles my mind that people were able to do my job without a computer at all. It just seems like things would have been significantly more difficult.

I’m from the pre-Internet era and even I have trouble imagining how to get shit done without it these days.

Born in 2004, I barely used the internet as a kid. Most my video games were off of CDs, and I occasionally got to use my dad’s Steam account. In like 4th grade I played some Wizards101, League of Legends, and some flash games, and started watching Minecraft youtubers. Besides that I mostly used the internet to download Minecraft mods. I kinda eased into the internet that way so I never really was surprised at having so much accessible to me.

I didn’t get on social media until I got on Reddit in high school. I tried Tumblr a bit but didn’t like it since it was too different. I still don’t use Twitter or anything, just Reddit and Lemmy and occasionally Pinterest.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library

I’m learning to build a house. The internet is useless. The pile of 1980s books in my FIL’s basement is teaching me the vast majority. The internet could be a wonderful thing. But, it’s primarily profit optimized bullshit. The only exception I’ve found is video-based basic computer science instruction.

Latish Gen Z here, it never really needed to click. Its been there the whole time, so it’s just a norm part of life, like it’s always been. Like, I get that it’s insane, but it’s not out of the norm for me, because it IS my norm. My parents were decently strict when I was little, but once I hit my tweens they gave me a LOT of slack.

ITT: I’m not a part of the two generations you specifically asked for, but here’s my life story anyway.

Yo some deleted their comments presumably because you’re millennial, GenX, whatever — I still find your comments interesting!

I’m a millennial, so I guess I grew up with the internet, but wasn’t something I really used myself until high school. I remember the “information superhighway” term pushed a lot in grade and middle school. My family only had dial-up until after I graduated high school, mainly because my parents were concerned I would spend too much time on the internet (they were 100% right lol). I wasn’t allowed on the internet at home unless I had to do research for a school project. I ended up having a do a lot of “research” for a while.

In high school, I got my hands on a second-hand laptop, so I would take it to friends houses or wherever I could get a wifi connection and screw around on the web. I spent a lot of time on Newgrounds and AIM before Youtube was a thing. I learned how to find the .swf files in the browser cache so I could rewatch flash videos when I was offline. I also learned some things about my family while browsing the browser cache, but I’ll be keeping those secrets.

I never used Napster, but did use Kazaa and similar to download music and such.

I didn’t quite understand how insane it is to have access to that much knowledge until later. To me, the internet was a convenient place to do research, play games, watch funny videos, and chat with friends.

GenX here. Got my first computer for HS graduation in 1994. My class had 70 kids in it, we had about 300 kids in total Freshmen to Seniors in a town of 2,500 people. I commuted to college to save money and signed up for a 1-hour seminar so I could get a Linux shell account through the university. From there I could fight to dial into one of twenty phone lines where I could surf the net as text using lynx at 2400 baud. I bought “The Internet Yellow Pages” because I wanted to find Archie & FTP sites to go look up stuff like the MIT lockpicking guide because search engines didn’t yet exist and knowing how to lockpick sounded edgy and cool.

I say this to set the scene for you. Because when I found out that there were people out there in the world on Usenet (when it was still a worldwide forum for discussion) just as geeked out about G1 Transformers as I was, it was something special. The same went for music, comics, books, games, movies. People hate on social media now, and yeah it’s a huge corporate cashgrab and has allowed some real turds to float up to the surface of humanity. But back then, it let rural gay kids find each other too. It let anime nerds find literally anyone to talk to about their hobby. Neurodivergent types could go post for hours with other neurodivergent types about their passions and it was ok. All of us that felt isolated and abnormal everywhere else in real life, could finally feel a sense of belonging with our “online friends.”

The realization “I’m not alone” was a life changing feeling. Like all the pressure being let out of the instapot. It rapidly changed how I viewed people different than myself. It opened my eyes to a reality so far beyond the tiny town I grew up in with its tiny town ambitions and tiny town ideals.

And as its evolved, its changed my learning. I don’t know how to explain the effort necessary to learn new things before search engines. If no one in your small circle had the answer to your problem, it required sitting at a computer and trying things over and over and over until you figured out the answer, for sometimes days or weeks. 2 days ago, I needed to set up a linux box up to auto-login, and after 30 seconds of googling and typing a command, it was working. And while my understanding of why it worked is shallow, I can unwind that command to understand the nuance of it online. And it seems we just take it for granted that we have our personal creativity backed by the knowledge of the whole human race when we need to tackle a problem now.

I’m not saying “kids these days got it easy,” because they’re facing problems I never imagined. But I have an intense joy at seeing how the generations after me seamlessly integrated this thing that changed my life into a device in their pocket. How they share personal struggles unashamedly with their peers, and get instant support from total strangers. How they can find their tribe online much more easily. How it’s just mundane to them now, to the point they don’t remember the specialness of it.

And it morphs all the time. Usenet became forums, became Slashdot, became Fark, became Myspace became Facebook became Twitter became Reddit became Instagram became Tiktok. Hard to believe each of those were “cool” at one point before the Enshitification took over most of them. It felt cool again when I joined Lemmy. No algorithms, slight bar for entry, not yet on the radar of big corporations, mostly perused by passionate people who wanted something outside the reach of its forebears. It feels like we are staking our claim on a little piece of the frontier again.

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I was just given a computer with unrestricted internet access and learnt it that way. Of course, the internet being unrestricted made me visit some questionable and illegal websites. Including CP and some hardcore NSFL using the tor browser. But I don’t regret it (other than the last points).

I’d always been amused at the fact that boomer school librarians were primarily the ones responsible for “teaching” students how to “use computers”. It really hammered home the point early on for me that you learn primarily by doing, not by being instructed.

How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?

I was too young to have it explained. I was just given access to computers since as far back as I can remember. And internet-connected computers almost just as far.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge

I disagree with the notion that all human knowledge is reachable through the internet. I didn’t used to have this perspective until only a few years ago.

Were your parents super strict about internet usage?

I had absolutely no supervision, aside from concern over time spent playing games (which I think they perceived differently from non-game activity, which can be equally as unproductive).

How quickly did you find workarounds?

Usurped de facto control over the family router as a by product of being the only one both willing and able to “help” “administrate” it. It remained that way until the day I moved out.

I think that millennials got to enjoy a once-in-human history opportunity of digital literacy asymmetry between immediately adjacent generations. We had unprecedented freedom.

I’m basically as old as gen z gets, '97. At home we only had dialup well after broadband was the norm, it wasn’t really worth using. Instead I learnt what the internet is and how it works at school in computer lab classes.

I was probably 7 or 8 when I made my first web page on our school intranet, they really pushed for us to be tech literate. The coolest part about this is that I grew up so tech literate that I was fully qualified for a job as a developer despite having no formal training. I did one introductory programming class in uni for a free HD and that was basically it.

Yeah, I absolutely understand the insanity of having the internet so available. We had it in my early days on school computers, but the real game changer has been smart phones. Being able to carry that information everywhere is the insane part to me.

Parents were strict, but I got around it really easily. I just used the wifi details my dad used for my Xbox to connect my iPod touch. I grew up on YouTube and podcasts from iTunes.

How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?

I don’t remember. We had classes throughout elementary school that taught us how to use computers. I learned how to read the news and use email from my mom. I learned how to play games like Silkroad and StarCraft from my dad. I don’t remember who taught me how to watch videos on YouTube. It kind of felt natural I guess.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library or university — one search away? That it’s absolutely insane you can engage in a real-time conversation with someone on the opposite side of the world? That you can find niche communities in an instant?

No, not really. I never thougt about it that way until I was much older.

Were your parents super strict about internet usage? How quickly did you find workarounds?

Very strict. I could only use the internet if it was for school work during the week days. But during the weekends, I was free to use it however I wanted.

There were no workarounds until high school when I was free to play games and surf the web as much as I wanted any day of the week.

I was allowed to use the family computer growing up, but had limited internet access, I mostly used it for Minecraft: Bedrock edition. I saw others around me like my parents, teachers using the internet though, and playing YouTube videos in class or whatever.

In school I used computers occasionally, I played Minecraft: Java edition 1.15 on them which was what got me to get Minecraft at home, and I remember being taught Kodu, which didn’t really use the internet either. I was taught how to use the Windows filesystem, and my classmates showed me the mrdoob website, which I found fun at the time, and now ironically use often for threejs.

In lockdown, I was given an Ubuntu machine by my parents for zoom lessons, which was my first real experience using the internet myself. The internet was not blocked at all on those machines, and I used it for Scratch as well with my parents permission - I had used Scratch on the school computers, so I knew what it was - which got me interested in programming, and also discovered porn for the first time on those machines, without my parents’ knowledge. I didn’t really understand the difference between how I was using Ubuntu with Firefox on those machines and Windows with Chrome or Edge or whatever it was at school, at the time.

When I was older, I bought my own Windows laptop with money I was gifted, which my parents installed Microsoft parental controls on so I could only go on for 3hrs a day, between certain times, and the internet, supposedly, except for certain whitelisted websites, was blocked. I discovered that my searching on the Windows taskbar search box, I could search bing unfiltered, and preview results and images, but with safe search on medium, and I couldn’t click on anything. It would show results for FGM, but not for porn, which probably messed me up a little and shows that filtering the web is not the answer.

At some point, without me actually doing anything, although my parents suspected it was my fault, the internet filter disappeared, and I was able to play online games, download apps that didn’t require admin access, and watch lots of YouTube (Mumbo Jumbo I remember I liked at the time), for about a month until I foolishly blabbed to my parents and they immediately reapplied the filter.

Later, I realised the Microsoft News app had an inbuilt web browser which you could only use to view one website at a time, with no back button or history, but again it was unfiltered. I was able to use it to watch YouTube videos, find porn, or indeed anything I wanted. At the time I took the existence of the internet and phones for granted, I didn’t realise how recent inventions they were, but I gained that appreciation over time.

At some point, before my parents gave me a phone (which they applied parental controls to as well), my computer started acting slow, and my father said it might have a virus, and recommended and helped me with installing Linux on it. This was when I started seriously getting into and understanding my computer, I was still programming on Scratch, but I figured out how to use the package manager (snap, I was stupid at the time) to install Minecraft Launcher, and went through a series of playing on multiple different servers with my friends and family, the majority of which I paid for hosting of, or managed the free hosting of with Aternos.

Then they got me an iPhone, which they applied Qustodia to, which for the longest time I couldn’t get around the web filter of - I had to go down to the laptop on my desk, or cumbersomely bring my laptop up to my bed every time I wanted to search for porn, but eventually I found this niche web browser which somehow managed to get past the web filter applied by Qustodia (which used the VPN feature), I also found this site appetize.io, which I did not use for its intended use of emulating iOS devices, but instead took advantage of the free trial which they gave you, and how the website was not blocked by the filter, but it let you use an unfiltered version of Safari within the emulated device. Which was obviously a worse user experience, as is a theme with these exploits, but it did the job.

That was when I really started getting into my computer, customising the OS and software more, really getting into coding, proper stuff like python and JavaScript, not just Scratch, and even made myself a very amateur looking website, but I was proud of it at the time, and now it’s actually pretty decent, if I do say so myself.

Eventually I bought myself an Android phone, and started degoogling, and switching from Reddit (which I used on the iPhone) to Lemmy (this happened a while ago, this is not my first account), and really getting into FOSS, coding, and understanding how amazing and crazy the internet is, and phones and computers in general.

So my advice to any parent is to not try and control your childrens’ internet access technologically, as they will find a way around it, even if it isn’t the most use friendly. I felt comfortable sharing the methods I used, as they might not even work anymore, and there are doubtless many others and many new ones I don’t know and that have emerged since. Talk to your children, explain to them why they should self restrain on parts of the internet, in a way you’re sure they actually agree and aren’t just shrugging you off, but also with the understanding that the best way to discover not to go to parts of the internet is to go there and be scarred, and they will likely learn like that too.

Obviously there is the exception of people on the internet trying to exploit them or meet them in real life, which you need to get them to tell you about if it happens, invading their privacy by reading all their messages is not the answer either; if I knew my parents were looking at all the LGBT+ and atheist stuff on the internet I was, it would have made it more difficult to see it, and I would be in a worse place now.

In a summary, children seeing information is not a problem, it is a good thing actually. As a parent, the best thing you can do is not to guard that information from them, but to teach them how to evaluate it in a critical manner, so they’re better prepared for the real world, and don’t grow up in a bubble.