Without the internet, I wouldn't have a job at all. I needed internet before mobiles and I would need it afterwards too.

I don't even believe most of the people would carry around those chunky screens (got one of those huge Lumia things as a company phone...ridiculous) with them without being able to access internet with it.

Sure being reachable is important but not as important as not having the internet. We managed without mobiles and we still manage when the batteries die.

Not that I don't see what you're saying, but there are a lot of us out here who've built careers around the Internet which are, at the very least, far better than any other prospect that might've been available to us. Certainly in my own case - absent the Internet, I'm nothing but a mouthy unlettered redneck with no meaningful prospects beyond maybe doing menial lab work for the local university, earning maybe $10k a year over the local median in exchange for a lifetime of daily health risks and all the nonsense that goes with being staff in an academic environment.

Don't get me wrong - I'm still a mouthy unlettered redneck, either way. But in a world where the Internet is a thing, I'm a mouthy unlettered redneck who is unaccountably able to earn a very good living for himself, enough so that he can not only support himself in comfortable style but help look after family back home who weren't so fortunate, including the distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up.

So while I'm not wholly unsympathetic to commentary like the Quartz author's, I find myself forced to take it with a grain of salt. Sure, the current situation is not ideal. There are a lot of things that could change for the better. Healthier habits around mobile devices. A more conscious understanding of the effect the Internet has on perception. Facebook burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the ashes buried under a crossroads at midnight. All kinds of things.

There are also a lot of people out here like me for whom life in a world with even the Internet we have is vastly better than the best lives we'd be able to make for ourselves in a world without. I think that's something worth keeping in mind in a conversation like this. But then, of course, I suppose I'd almost have to think so, wouldn't I?

The past is a foreign country. It is also dead. To study it has value. To pretend oneself a tourist there has not.

I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time.

Experts back then, were really experts. There was a clear line between expert, hobbyist, and passing interest.

Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.

How many times have we had that conversation with someone who knows their topic backwards and forwards and after minutes, we have a deeper understanding of it than almost anyone around. Expand that out to an hour with a few key/relevant questions to frame the conversation and it is totally believable.

That said, bibliographic databases have been around since computers. They were just restricted to librarians, mostly because of infrastructure issues.

The same goes for the anti-vaccination folks, the "climate change is not real" folks, the anti-fluoridation folks, the anti-bike lane/trail and anti-public park people [1], and more.

[1] Yes, they are real. Bike lanes and public parks, they believe, are part of a UN agenda to make cities more attractive so that the population will concentrate in the cities, which will make it easier to impose martial law and confiscate guns. Before the internet this would have been a total joke. Now those people can organize, and show up in large groups at city council meetings considering parks and bike lanes, and get those projects killed.

Though it was easier to just control the masses with TVs and radios - they cant talk back, so you can spout whatever you want at them and they'll follow.

Pretty sure that Trump would've been just as popular today if the Internet was not around.

The internet has made people wiser and more savvy too. They've stopped one interest group from being able to make their views and messages seem like the only one.

I thought it was a useful source for Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920s, where investigators are supposed how to use libraries effectively.

Link to review of English translation: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

And oh, I recently tried starting a habit of keeping an up-to-date directory of greppable markdown notes with links to the papers and books I've read, directly inspired by Eco's index card system and his gigantic private library.

I disagree somewhat and it's possible the disagreement depends on how we slice up the time ranges of "mobile phone" and "internet".

The "internet" divided into 2 periods:

pre- www internet: 1980s text based, Usenet, government and universities:

post- www internet: 1990s graphics on webpages, google, wikipedia, amazon

The "mobile phones" divided into 2 periods:

"dumb phones" pre 2007 of Motorola/Nokia

"smart phones" post 2007 in the iPhone/Android world

Thinking back to 2006, the internet changed daily life much more meaningfully than mobile phones. When I got the "dumb phone" in the 1990s that cost 70 cents a minute, it didn't change my daily life the way Google/Wikipedia/Amazon did. To this day, I probably do 20+ queries on google.com every single day. I hardly interact with my iPhone and I don't install apps on it. In 1998, I remember booking a plane ticket online (the fancy new "e-ticket") from Southwest Airlines and it seemed magical when the gate agent let me board the plane even though I hadn't spoken to a single human being. I'd agree that pre-1990s internet of dialing up into BBS's and chatting on Usenet felt more like a toy than a necessity of life.

I'm guessing the folks favoring "mobile phones" as more life-changing than the internet are thinking of post-2007 smartphones. (But I'd argue part of what makes smartphones "smart" is the internet.)

If society were forced to choose, I'm confident most would rather have full internet with no mobile phones rather than 100% mobile phone coverage and zero internet infrastructure. Since both technologies grew up together, we can only entertain though experiments about which technology is more meaningful to humanity.

Mobile phones are just incomparable to the advances the internet has brought. The internet put the whole world into high speed mode.

When mobile phones started coming out, they were just something rich people spent too much money on. Most people I know bought their first mobile phone when it became less than $200. When the internet became accessible on mobile phones (and I mean really accessible, not just loading slow terrible UX websites on nerdy HTC Windows Phone palmtops like I had), suddenly even the middle class spent upwards of $800 on their phones.

That to me signals how important they feel it is to be connected, not just one to one, but to the entire net. The smartphone is a device that connects you to the internet in a convenient manner, that it's a mobile phone is secondary to that from my perspective.

I agree that smartphones are another revolution of comparable magnitude, but that started less than ten years ago: we don't even have a first fully-grown up post-smartphone generation yet.

Mobile phones, on the other hand, didn't change much. Before them, we used the ubiquitous payphones when needed. Beepers briefly became a fad, but that faded out even before mobile phones became common; most people just didn't need constant telephone availability.

So to impress a girl I made my PC dial me to ring my phone but it was the Fax app! I had to step away because I was afraid she'd hear the squeal of the Fax eeeeee!

One time probably mid 80s my uncle had a brick cellphone but was embarrassed to use it. At a Kmart entrance he went to the corner leaned on the wall with his back to everyone while he talked. As he was on the phone a little old lady was getting change from her purse. My uncle finished his call and left shocking the lady who thought there was a payphone on the wall.

It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE?

If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate.

Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?

Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.

Another technology with wide impact is the digital camera, which appeared after 2000, and spread in any and all devices today. We will remember the world since the digital camera in a very different way than before. I have a pittance of analog photos, but over 100K digital ones.

People tend to remember only what they photograph. In a few years, we will only remember what we shot pictures of. We tend to lock in those moments to the exclusion of the rest. Along with the internet, I'd say cameras are also a huge influence society.

I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.

Which I guess I don't have much of a further point, but a random slideshow pulled from hundreds of events (the screen saver I setup does the random per folder) is sort of a thing that wouldn't work without the photos being digital.

Then some years latter dad got a mobile phone (a brick of a Nokia) that was used sparingly for the same task.

A major movie/sitcom trope, yes.

Information wise, Google changed everything. There was a before, where you the information was there, but you couldn't find it and an after, where almost every information you want is easily reachable.

Wikipedia is also an important milestone, but without proper search (just compare the internal search to Google) it would be a fraction useful.

I personally do not find the cost of a data plan to be worth it. For anything urgent there's SMS or voice calls. Everything else can wait until I can get on wifi, which is really not much of a hurdle, any hotel lobby, coffee shop, etc. will have it.

Better to say "Search engines." A huge chunk of that change was already well underway before Google--as a specific product and company--came onto the scene.