This year marks thirty years since I graduated from high school. It is a line of demarcation in most people’s lives. It’s a symbolic finish line crossed. The only difference is that once you cross this finish line, you are face-to-face with a wide-open horizon. The possibilities are endless, and also terrifying.
I find it poetic that the year I graduated from high school, 1996, feels like a line of demarcation in the world as well. It was during this same time that the world was changing. Much like when your life goes from high school to being in your 40s, sometimes in a flash, the world went from analog to digital in a snap.
The World Wide Web first became available for the general public on April 30, 1993. We didn’t know it at the time, but the countdown was on to the change in how we see and interact with each other and the world as a whole.
My family got our first computer, a Gateway model, early in 1996. It was just in time to have a bit of a leg up on my final months of high school work. Those first few weeks and months saw little change. I wasn’t on the internet all the time. Living in a house with four siblings did limit my screen time. The ball was already rolling, though.
I have heard so many people around my age say that the 1990s were the last decade to have a feel and a look. I agree, but can’t put my finger on why. It may be because it’s the final decade before technology went fully digital. Your opinion may vary.
Think about it. What is retro chic today? 80s and 90s fashions and trends. Thirty years from now, do you think kids will be clamoring for whatever the style is today? What is the style today anyway?
The day I first went online, I still listened to CDs, watched VHS movies, watched cable television on a boxy CRT TV, and talked on a phone attached to the wall. Granted, the phone was cordless, but still. The ability to find any bit of information or converse with people from anywhere was something my 1980s-kid brain never could have comprehended.
The reason I see 1996 as the jumping-off point might be because it’s where I come in as far as internet access goes. It also perfectly lines up with a major life change, as far as high school graduation. However, there are stats to back it up.
In 1995, only 14% of Americans had internet access. I was not one of them. In 1996, that number jumped to between 20-23%. By the time 1999 ended, it was estimated that as many as 50% of Americans had access to the Web at home, school, or work. In less than the time it would have taken me to go to a four-year college, internet access more than doubled. From there, it was off to the races.
Instant messages became preferable to telephone calls. Digital MP3 songs became easier to manage than huge analog music collections. Websites topped libraries for school research. Why go outside to play when you have dozens of friends inside in a chat room?
All of these changes are necessarily bad. They are, however, huge shifts in societal norms. Then again, shifts in society happen all the time. I think they seem more dangerous and egregious when they’re happening to the generations after you.
I am sure my great-great-grandparents couldn’t understand why my grandparents wanted to waste their time with automobiles, radio, and motion pictures. I am sure my grandparents couldn’t wrap their heads around Beatlemania, the Hippie movement, and television. I know that my parents thought my friends and I wasted time with loud music, video games, and extreme sports. Now my generation is the parents, and the music, fashion, and viral trends all seem odd. The point is, we all enjoyed something that our parents thought was dumb.
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| At one point the automobile was seen as a weird passing fad. |
A big part of me never wants to become as close-minded and ignorant as my father, so I do my best to try to understand the who, what, and why of today’s generation. My nieces and nephews are good barometers for that. I don’t need to stay ‘hip’ or relevant. I don’t need to know the words to some random K-pop group's songs, or understand GenZ slang (although I understand ‘slay’ because of my niece Emma). I don’t need to recreate TikTok viral trends because I’d come off as a near-fifty year old man trying desperately to cling to straws of youth.
A reason why I think that 90s kids have adapted so well to the changing landscape of the 21st century is the fact that we got the best of both worlds. We got childhoods free of social media, cyber-bullying, online gaming, and homogenized music (sorry). We were also still young enough to learn and adapt to the rise of the internet, online lives, smartphones, and more.
I might have grown up without the internet, but I have lived more than half of my life with it now. I was there for the rise of America Online, Napster, RealPlayer, Hotmail, AIM, Ask Jeeves, guestbooks, Trojan viruses, and pixelated videos that took ages to download. I am comfortable fully immersed in a digital world, or sitting looking at printed photos, reading a book, and listening to a CD. Yes, I still have my entire analog music collection, just nothing to play it on.
1996 truly was a life-changing year, not only for me but for millions of others. I graduated from high school while many others graduated from analog to digital. The world can be cyclical, though. I have noticed in the last several years a growing number of people looking to pull back from their digital lives and retrieve some of their old analog selves. Maybe that’s why I never got rid of my CD’s? I always have the option to take a step back and remember who I was back before the internet rose to prominence.
This was a subject I wanted to talk about for a while. The strange timeline where my graduation and the rise of the internet intersect. I am also a sucker for nostalgia; it’s kind of my thing, so I didn’t need much prodding to do a deep dive into life back then. All it took was a blizzard and no power for a few days to remind me of living in 1995. No laptop. No smartphone. Just me and my mind to help me escape from boredom. I think we all need that sometimes.
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