These kids don’t know they’re born.

I have got to that age where I start reminiscing about everything once I among my own kind. I’m not sure whether the present is so dull that it’s not worth remarking on, or whether it’s a way of rooting out interlopers and bonding with like-minded people.

If someone doesn’t remember the theme tune to Funhouse (‘there’s a whole lot of fun, prizes to be won…’), sitting down and watching Noel’s House Party on a Saturday night (‘blobby blobby blobby!’) then they are not to be trusted. Although I’ve got a few friends who I keep forgetting are foreign. And I keep asking them stupid questions. It’s doubly disconcerting when the Irish speak English so well.

But anyway – I’ve been remembering recently how much the internet has changed in its short existence. I remember back in 1998, when we first had an internet connection, and my dad set us up with email addresses in the house (we’d been given them at school as early as 1995, but they were basically useless). The internet was mainly used for sending and receiving emails once or twice a day, usually waiting until you had a substantial number of them built up. You’d never listen to music online (online! What a fanciful notion. We were surfing the information superhighway), the soundtrack coming out of your computer was more likely to be a little something like this.

Shopping online is such a recent thing, and yet it has taken over our lives. A decade ago I got my first smartphone, which was basically the size of a small trailer tent, and it had email and a rudimentary browser. Most importantly, I could blog with it. The internet was still finding itself, like a middle class gap year student. Social media built up through forums and chats and ICQ and MSN, life was a big conversation and the whole world was a world of discovery.

Nowadays opinion is like being vomited on by a tramp, checking your emails like walking down an Amsterdam back alley at 2am, being assaulted from all angles with offers and pleas and barely literate scams. We take solace in the real world, where once the internet was a pleasant escape. I suppose it’s better that way. Stuff happens on the internet and you tell your friends about it. It used to be the other way round for a while, but it seems we’re coming back.

That’ll give us something to be nostalgic about.