Yes (although I'd probably put the real dividing line at more like 12 years). Facebook wasn't available outside of certain institutions until 2006, the same year Twitter dates to. The iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and arguably didn't really take off until the 3GS in 2009.
So, yes, the internet was well-established by the 2000s. But today's always connected world of social media and everything else is only about a decade old.
ADDED: Of course, if you turn back the clock about another ten years, for many people it would be the difference between pre-Internet and a mostly broadband-connected very commercialized internet.
I think the biggest difference for me is that I use spotify now for music, rather than downloading it. And streaming video is now legit, so there's less need for torrents and newsgroups.
I know personally, my attention span is much worse than it was years ago. It's tough to find friends, and if I weren't married, I bet it would be tough and highly competitive to find a mate. I think this has something to do with it.
I think you're partly agreeing with me. I didn't have an iPhone until 2010. Before that I had a Treo, which was much less capable. So prior to 2010, I didn't really have a lot of mobile connectivity other than email and some (slow) web surfing.
15 years ago I was saying the same thing, but about SMS and Internet Messengers. Almost 20 years ago I was complaining about how online chat had killed email, and I rarely got emails that were more than 1-2 sentences, and that instant messaging content was very shallow with nothing of substance. I actually stopped using Instant Messaging around 2002 for this very reason.
14-15 years ago a colleague visited S Korea and Japan, and was struck at how the norm was that couples would be sitting at a table staring at their phones and not talking to each other - before the iPhone was launched.
Is the logic there that if people have complained about something frequently in the past then it's not true? On the scale of human history 100 years is a blip so it's quite possible that for many periods of 10 years things people can observe troubling patterns and in fact a problem can be compounding over time.
People complained about racism and mistreatment of blacks in America 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc etc. Is your logic that we don't have a problem with racism?
People have complained that destruction of our ecosystem is getting worse, and they did 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc, etc. Would you really argue that "therefore it's no big deal"?
13 years ago there was no iphone, 13 years before that basically no one used the WWW, 13 years before that virtually no one had personal computers. Now you can disagree about whether the effects of change are good or bad, but communication the fact that communication has changed rapidly in 30+ years is not something that can be argued and is hardly just a fact of human life throughout history.
Ten years ago much of the population still considered paying any attention whatsoever—any—to a cellphone in the company of others, maybe unless it actually rang (remember phone calls that weren't spam?), to be incredibly rude.
All that changed very fast over the following 5 years or so.
Likely the same people that denigrated nerds for liking tech are now glued to their device while others are talking to them _in real life_.
This has pretty much been normalized as more and more people expect immediate response to whatever trivial whine they have.
I'm inclined to follow Peter Thiels view here. We were promised flying cars and got 140 (now more) characters on Twitter.
Tech has changed. But everything else is so much the same it almost hurts.
This is entirely due to tech financiers like Peter Thiel investing in software to the exclusion of other forms of technology. He could be funding flying cars in the way that Elon Musk is funding space travel.
I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.
I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind the bars.
And that's even if the technological progress on the outside had stood perfectly still for some reason.