Born in 1991 for reference

When I was a kid, there was more or less no internet as we think of it today. It existed, but only tech nerds used it for much: images took time to load and were poor resolution, videos you can forget about, and forums were the main thing

People watched TV, read books and went outside much more

The internet slowly gained more features. When i was in middle school, the first social networks (myspace) started to appear. At first these were not full of "rage bait" stuff because the attention economy was only just beginning. YouTube was born around this time, and it was the first time the internet went from being weird nerds to being "most people"

Early devices like iPods and flip phones would become smartphones by the time I was in college. YouTube went from blurry videos that took forever to load to something like it's present form, with lots of videos and ads and things

Most of the early internet was spread across 100s of forums and fun sites like ytmnd, but by the time of the smartphone it consolidated around "the five websites" that exist today

The culture changed a lot around this. The early internet was more anarchic, and felt separated from society, but soon the two would become more integrated.

Since then, well, you'll be old enough to know what occurred