In the ’90s, I made great friends from across the globe on chat rooms. Many of them still remain my friends today.
Think about that for a moment.
We entered a room full of complete strangers — people whose faces we had never seen, whose countries we had never visited, whose cultures we barely understood — and somehow we came out with friendships that lasted decades.
Today, we enter social media platforms filled with people we supposedly “know,” and every day we walk out with new enemies.
What changed?
The internet of the ’90s was a place of curiosity. The first question was usually, “Where are you from?” Not “Which side are you on?”
A teenager in India could speak to someone in America, Europe, Australia, or Japan and feel like an explorer discovering a new world. We were fascinated by differences. Different accents, different lifestyles, different food, different beliefs — everything was a conversation starter.
Today, differences are often treated like declarations of war.
The old chat rooms gave us almost nothing — no fancy profile pictures, no follower counts, no blue ticks, no algorithms pushing us towards outrage. Ironically, because we knew so little about each other, we tried harder to know each other.
Modern social media gives us everything — photos, opinions, political beliefs, achievements, vacations, personal details — and somehow we understand each other less.
Earlier, we logged in to meet people.
Now, many log in to defeat people.
The internet changed from “Tell me your story” to “Let me prove you wrong.”
Of course, the ’90s internet was not perfect. There were arguments, fake identities, and unpleasant people even then. But the culture was different. Attention was not a currency. Anger was not a business model. A stranger was not automatically an opponent.
Maybe we were also different.
Maybe we had the innocence of discovering a miracle — the ability to talk to someone thousands of kilometres away in real time. We valued that connection because we remembered a world without it.
Today’s generation was born into connection, but ironically struggles with conversations.
The greatest tragedy of the internet is not that machines became smarter.
It is that somewhere along the way, humans became less patient with each other.
In the ’90s, strangers became friends.
Today, friends become strangers.
And that perhaps is the story of the internet itself.