Overview: Life Before the Internet is a fascinating look back at a slower, simpler time, when Amazon was just a river.

Verdict: There was life before Google and smartphones, but few would recognize it today. We had more free time, as we didn’t spend hours on social media. Our children roamed free and learned to fend for themselves. We enjoyed the freedom and space that came from being unreachable, and we couldn’t take work home. We didn’t need to invent slow living; it was part of the deal! See how the last unconnected generation used to live. Catch the tempo of everyday life, from home and school to work and leisure - and perhaps reflect on what we might learn.

It’s hard to imagine a time in the world where smartphones and social media weren’t an integral part of your life. But here in Life Before the Internet: What we can learn from the good old days, author Michael Gentle takes us back to what seems like an eternity ago, to see how life before the internet was different and, interestingly, how we can learn from those days today.

Some of the obvious stand outs here are that if the word Amazon was mentioned in a sentence, it was only in reference to the river in South America. No one could think about the possibility of online stores. Last-minute plans were not possible once you left your house. You’d be very careful to set up exact meeting times and locations with your friends.

If there was a song that you loved, you would have to record it off the radio. Looking for a compilation of songs? You’d have to make that yourself too. There was no online shopping or Zoom — if you wanted to buy something or see a friend, you needed to get off the couch and out of your house to socialize.

Before the days of Google and Wikipedia, if you wanted information on a particular topic, you would have to look it up in an encyclopedia, listing everything in alphabetical order. And, amongst a host of others, it was a lot more obvious if you wanted to look at something other than the work in front of you on the computer! Staring out the window or looking at inspiring pictures on the office walls were far more obvious than they are today.

Oh, and if you wanted to see photos of someone’s vacation or a new house, you had to wait for them to mail them to you or drop them off in person. And if something happened in the news that interested or intrigued you – like an earthquake or hurricane – you’d to read the paper that week (or watch the local news) when it was reported, instead of going online immediately to get more information as we can now.

What Gentle does here is dutifully remind us of some of the small pleasures of life that we all now just simply take for granted. From casually enjoying an evening out, to our homes being for retiring (not working), to making plans and sticking to them, to not knowing directions and needing a paper map, most everything we took for granted has been replaced by an online electronic presence.

OK, sure, the Internet is an integral part of our lives. It’s become so much a part of our daily life that we can hardly remember a time when we couldn’t look something up on the Internet. And even though this resource is so present in our lives, we often don’t think about how it helps us.

But if we also become respective, dare to pick apart a few of our made-easier things today, much like peaking an onion, some of the layers before we got to where we are today could easily have just relented in their progress (and we would have been mighty grateful regardless, I believe).

I mean, the biggest one for me being that before instant messaging, our lives had more downtime and fewer distractions. We didn’t have constant access to an endless amount of information. Instead, we had to meet in person with friends or family and talk about what was going on in the world. That meant people gathered around the dinner table and discussed current events or politics – all without the distraction of their phones.

The Internet has changed our lives in both positive and negative ways and here Gentle provides an insightful flashback to a time much simpler and, at times, perhaps more healthy for us overall.

About the Author - Michael Gentle is a former IT and data-privacy professional, and the author of a number of bestselling books on business and technology. He has lived and worked in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, and speaks several languages. He is now retired and lives in Setúbal, Portugal.

Official Book Purchase Link