Today marks the anniversary of the introduction of the WorldWideWeb by British programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, the first internet browser. But wait for it, this only happened in 1991 and boy have things changed since then…
8. College
There is a few of us in the Her.ie office who went to college in the early noughties (we are turning 21 again this year) and we remember the days when the only way of searching for an article or researching a piece was taking yourself off to the library and looking it up. Shocking! Now, if we wanted to research the contents of an atom, google and boom! Project done. Universities still spread vicious rumours that the internet is not a trustworthy source. Lies, we say.
This guy. Really happy about the internet…
7. Shopping
Before amazon and ebay were everyday names, what the hell did we do when we wanted to buy something we couldn’t find in the shops? We’ll tell you what you did, you went door to door to every shop in town to find those shoes you saw randomly for 25 seconds on the TV but you’re not sure what brand they are. You wanted to get a dress you knew was only available to buy in the States? We inevitably just shrugged our shoulders and went back to our everyday humdrum existence sans dress we were pretty sure would change our lives…
6. Health
So you had a cough and you went to the doctor who told you actually have some kind of virus that is way worse than you originally thought and could get cause a great deal of damage to your lungs. So he wrote down the name of the virus and you went home and googled it. Then you found out that besides the million side effects of your medicine that can include sleep walking and laughing excessively, you will most certainly die from an inexplicable strain from the original virus. Well, at least it bloody warned you! Prior to the interwebs, we would have just dropped dead.
Surely a still from a horror movie?
5. Jobs
In the olden days, it was entirely normal for your Mammy to write up a letter enquiring if there were any positions in a certain company and requesting an interview. Inevitably they wrote you back a lovely letter as well informing you of an interview time or politely telling you to go away. Now, we can sit in the comfort of our own homes in our pajamas endlessly searching the internet for positions and sending out CV’s that will never be replied to… But at least we know what companies are hiring! Not in the olden days, oh no. All a guessing game…
4. Facebook and Twitter
“I’ll facebook you” and “did you get my tweet?” are now two phrases that are particularly commonplace in everyday language. We in the Her.ie office have no idea how we would remember events and birthdays without the help of Mark Zuckerberg. And if you decided to emigrate to Australia? Well that was really it then. Off you go, bye! No more contact with anyone… ever. As for twitter, well we just depended on Six One news to tell us everything, didn’t we really?
3. Cat Pictures
The ordinary household cat is sort of going through a renaissance recently online; there are cat pictures everywhere depicting cats doing things you never knew they could do before. They open doors, they look smug and annoyed; they are even ninjas. Funny photos are of course not just restricted to cats, they are just flavour of the month… For the last seven hundred months. We know that life would definitely be more difficult without cat pictures…
2. “Wait, I need to google it…”
The internet… The ultimate fact-checker. Be truthful, on how many occasions have said the following: “What? That’s not true. Let me google it.” Or the other favourite: “who was that guy who was in that thing with your one and she was a space cadet… Do you remember it? I’ll have to google it.” Seriously, we must have been a really stupid race before the internet. Or were we smarter because we didn’t have this instant access to knowledge? No. We were definitely more stupid.
1. This Taylor Swift video
