being old enough to truly experience a certain time period

[pachinkoroomwinnersclub]

I think thats that best way I can put it. I was a kid in the 90s but my teen years were the late 2000s so I got to experience the whole first wave internet boom but I wasn't really old enough to appreciate it. I know vaporwave is mostly about a sense of nostalgia for the 80s/90s/00s but does anyone else feel a desire to be able to be an age to appreciate the time? Like I think it would be something else to be ten years old and do all the things I do now but in that time. Maybe its just me.

 

[admin]

Yea I know exacly what you mean. I wish I was older at around 90s and truly experienced what the internet was all about. Its always when you are older you feel you should have appreciate it more.

 

[pachinkoroomwinnersclub]

Something about looking pointless crap in an internet cafe and instead of in my bedroom seems so interesting. Getting to enjoy all that media in real time would be something wouldnt it? lol

 

[admin]

Something about looking pointless crap in an internet cafe and instead of in my bedroom seems so interesting. Getting to enjoy all that media in real time would be something wouldnt it? lol

yea ;D you know what I really wanna see was how it was when people used BBS and how the dynamics were like. But I do have found memories of using the Nicktropolis in middle school though

 

[DaveSpeedo]

I was born in the late 90s and lived my teen years in 2010s, so I have only experienced technology, when it progressed to next level :D. I can only try to feel the old days with vaporwave :D

 

[Eis-T]

I think having only a very partial memory of a time adds to the experience that vaporwave creates. Most Vaporwave I know makes an exaggerated image of how things were, and I wonder if they aren't more projections of what could've been. This is far more interesting to me than just plain old nostalgia for a time that was. Creating these secondary experiences is what vaporwave artists excell at. A fantastic example is Catsystem Corp's "live from electronicon". It brings you the memory of a concert you didn't attend where you remembered hanging out in a mall in the 80's you never went to. A constructed memory in a constructed memory. Vaporwave at its best.
but getting back at your question, I don't think you can ever be old enough fully experience a certain time period. Experience is always very fractured and colored. Your experience as a kid is as good as any.

 

[pachinkoroomwinnersclub]

I think having only a very partial memory of a time adds to the experience that vaporwave creates. Most Vaporwave I know makes an exaggerated image of how things were, and I wonder if they aren't more projections of what could've been. This is far more interesting to me than just plain old nostalgia for a time that was. Creating these secondary experiences is what vaporwave artists excell at. A fantastic example is Catsystem Corp's "live from electronicon". It brings you the memory of a concert you didn't attend where you remembered hanging out in a mall in the 80's you never went to. A constructed memory in a constructed memory. Vaporwave at its best.
but getting back at your question, I don't think you can ever be old enough fully experience a certain time period. Experience is always very fractured and colored. Your experience as a kid is as good as any.

That is certainly a take I hadn't fully considered but extremely well put. The reason I was asking really was that I had always understood VW as visual and audio representation of our memories seeing/hearing these memories from the past with the lens of hindsight and maturity of the working of the world and could possibly be enhanced by being able to be more aware of it in its modern day, but I see what you're saying and how clearer nostalgia can influence those memories

 

[SELCOUTH]

I think thats that best way I can put it. I was a kid in the 90s but my teen years were the late 2000s so I got to experience the whole first wave internet boom but I wasn't really old enough to appreciate it. I know vaporwave is mostly about a sense of nostalgia for the 80s/90s/00s but does anyone else feel a desire to be able to be an age to appreciate the time? Like I think it would be something else to be ten years old and do all the things I do now but in that time. Maybe its just me.

I really wish I was older in the early 2000's. To be able to experience the last slice of time where people didn't spend so much time on their phones, but where technology and entertainment were at our finger tips and we had the interconnectivity of the internet. I was 6 years old in the year 2000, but sometimes I wish I were a young adult around this time to really experience the culture. Pre 2000-2004 seemed like an amazing time to be a young adult and I can't help but feel like it's really gone downhill since Facebook became popular.

 

[7-Eleven Spy]

It feels strange to me that I can now tell someone "Back in my day, the internet was _____" and it be true. It feels interesting to have been able to have seen the previous "iteration" of the internet and being able to draw a line from this old internet to how we got to the "current" internet.

 

[ignika98]

The age at which you live through things drastically alters your experiences, but there is no "true" experience of any particular time.

For example, if you were a young adult in the 2010s, you would be at just the right age to take advantage of the content boom on sites like twitch and YouTube. However, if you're a kid during that same time, you're at just the right age to watch that content but not old enough to make it. Which one of those is the "true" experience?

 

[Pink Fluffy Cat]

I'm glad that I'm old enough to experience the days when people of different side of views can have actual discussion on the internet. Now everyone these days would just stick to their own echo chambers, post screencaps of the other side and shit talk behind people. Basically mid schooler tier behavior.

 

[Rikstah]

Indeed, having been born in the late 80s i don't think i can really claim i experienced the 90s properly. You just experienced childhood then and every child in a stable / good environment will see their childhood as a golden time.

That being said i was a teenager / uni student throughout the early to mid 2000s and that was a glorious time.

One thing that fills me with crazy nostalgia is the first internet cafe boom. People just chilling regularly at net cafes to game (obviously) but also just to watch dramas, chat, eat n drink etc.

Having this strong seperation between the physical real life and the digital world greatly increased the appreciation for both I think.

People seemed to engage with life itself more in the early 2000s. The always on, cable TV style smartphone internet of today somehow detracts from it.

 

[punishedgnome]

I got to experience late 90s Internet as I was in my teens. I started posting on my first forum in 1999 when I was 15. The things I always felt like I missed out on was the heyday of BBS in the 1980s and Usenet in the early to mid 1990s. BBS in particular seemed really cool aesthetically with the beautiful ascii art some of the sysops had designed for their servers.






Those are ones you can buy for your server today I've just posted for illustrative purposes to show what I'm talking about. Imagine connecting to a BBS with your Commodore 64 or Atari 8-bit back in the day and getting one of those. I've gone on some Telnet BBS servers, but they usually have like 10 guys on them. It's not the same as those 1980s BBS servers when it was at its peak.

 

[Max Chill]

Oh boy, finally. I was looking for this kind of thread.

Mine's about MMORPGs. I always felt back when I was highschool that I got left out during the dawn of RPGs arriving in the multiplayer scene and this was mostly influenced by WoW, I pretty much got into the third wave of MMORPGs like ESO. Sure, the more modern it was, the more streamlined and optimized mechanics, especially the UI, was, but I wanted to experience that old and overly cluttered UI. Got a taste of that from LOTRO, it's the closest I can get without spending too much money nor needing subscription monthly/annually just so I can progress.

It's basically one big FOMO shebang back in those days, like I was frantically trying to run down an ascending escalator of time. Later on I had to let go of that, cause I wasn't the best in speeding MMOs and maintaining friendships online there.

Edit: Came back to the game to visit for a few hours a few months ago, just discovered that our fellowship got disbanded. It was the most fun I had with people in any MMOs I've played. I miss my frens there.

 

[handoferis]

I really wish I was older in the early 2000's. To be able to experience the last slice of time where people didn't spend so much time on their phones, but where technology and entertainment were at our finger tips and we had the interconnectivity of the internet. I was 6 years old in the year 2000, but sometimes I wish I were a young adult around this time to really experience the culture. Pre 2000-2004 seemed like an amazing time to be a young adult and I can't help but feel like it's really gone downhill since Facebook became popular.

yeah, i miss the old days where if you wanted to be online out and about it was like, grab your laptop, use your brick phone as a dialup modem and go wild. many good memories of posting on irc in places i absolutely shouldn't have been able to. phones seemed cool when they first showed up but are absolutely shit boring in comparison

 

[Cobalt]

Yeah I wish I was older during the 2000's. I missed out on basically all the cool shit from that era even thought I technically lived through it. I'm glad at the very least that I'm not as completely fucked as a lot of the gen Alpha kids in elementary and middle school now. I caught the golden age of Youtube, Roblox back when you could do anything you wanted on there and not everything was p2w. I made a lot of friends playing Roblox, Animal Jam, Poptropica, etc. in my local library's computer lab. I think the cohort I grew up in were the last group to still have balance between playing on technology and playing outside as I was an absolute hooligan outdoors. Riding my bike around town, doing these huge nerf/airsoft battles, loitering outside the local gas station, building forts in the woods, etc. Looking at my cousins and other kids I know who are growing up now they don't do any of that. Everything is online and distant nowadays which has got to be fucking with these kids heads. They objectively aren't around other kids nearly as much as previous generations. I feel like I missed out on some cool shit but I'm still glad I grew up when I did.

 

[manpaint]

I whish I had experienced the wild west of the internet during it's apex. While I certainly witnessed the tail end of it, by the time I got online, stuff like Geocities were already gone.

I am also very curious about how it would have felt growing up in the 90s. Everyone descrive the pre-20001 as very optimistic but it's very hard to imagine it.

 

[Jackeline]

I whish I had experienced the wild west of the internet during it's apex. While I certainly witnessed the tail end of it, by the time I got online, stuff like Geocities were already gone.

I am also very curious about how it would have felt growing up in the 90s. Everyone descrive the pre-20001 as very optimistic but it's very hard to imagine it.

Same, i was born in the 2002 like bro, the post 9/11 world is the only thing i know.

 

[Jackeline]

I wish i was older, so at least i could catch a glimpse of how epic the touhou boom was in the late 2000s and early 2010s

 

[manpaint]

Our country only got internet around 2006 (or at least became mainstream near that date). I wish I got to experience Worlf of Warcraft and RuneScape at the apex of their popularity.