The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There’s an intuitive belief that technology changes people, and the internet feels like an unusually straightforward example of this process. But it’s also possible that the relationship between the internet and the evolution of society was more epiphenomenal: It’s possible that society is always changing, and that the rise of the internet was a coincidental event that merely made that natural process more visible. The nineties were technologically defined by a reinvention of human communication and the expanding power of network computing. It stands to reason that this reinvention must explain any psychological difference between a twenty-five-year-old in 1989 and a twenty-five-year-old in 2001. But then again, the difference between a young adult in 1969 and a young adult in 1981 was equally dramatic, and both versions of that twenty-five-year-old used tools of telecommunication that were essentially identical. So how do we know it was the internet that changed people’s brains? How do we know those brains weren’t going to change anyway? The short answer is that we don’t. The long answer is that certain social dynamics reversed so quickly that the inversion could not have happened without some kind of unnatural cause, and every reasonable explanation eventually connects with online communication.