Additionally, it seems to me that in every period of time, as progress is made, people gaze towards the past with rose-colored glasses on. Every time period has problems, and we tend to think about "the old days" as having been better... but in general, when we are dissatisfied with the present, we look towards the positive aspects of the past, while sort of glossing over the negatives.The entire reason for the creation of new technology, the entire reason for progress, is that we were trying to surmount problems that plagued us. It goes all the way back to agriculture... hunting and gathering is a rough life, death was much more common. The development of agriculture allowed us to more easily survive. The development of ever more advanced tools allowed us to more efficiently create more of what we needed. The development of electricity and artificial heating and cooling allowed us to not freeze to death, to have light at night, to prevent our food going bad, and so on. The development of trains, cars and planes has allowed travel throughout the world in short amounts of time. The development of phones has allowed us to keep in contact with each other even when we're not in the same place. Yet, there are always people yearning for "the good old days". It's not special to this time. Why is that, I wonder?
I remember years ago, I was very anti-establishment. I would say to myself often, as I watched the news and thought over and over again about the things that are wrong in the world, that I wish the infrastructure would collapse and we could go back to living off the land. I felt that life would be better, harder physically, yes, but better, less stressful, I'd be happier. Then we had a big snowstorm, several feet of snow on the ground, and the power went out for almost a week. I didn't have a lot of food, and I couldn't go anywhere because there was too much snow to even leave my driveway, let alone my street. It was cold, and dark. I went through all my candles by the third day... it would get dark in my house about 4:30 and not light until 9:30. It eventually got down to 34 degrees inside. It was kind of exciting at first, but by the end of it, I felt so grim. When the electricity came back on I cried I was so happy. It was a pretty sharp lesson in appreciating what we have.
I realize we're talking about the Internet, not electricity, but to me, it's all related. It's a fear of the new, with resulting focus on the negative aspects of the new (or maybe the other way around), leading to a desire for the old, which may, in fact, be misplaced.