It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was on their way to becoming a Western upper-middle class college-educated person) as that was the only person who had the money, time, and education to afford the peripherals (home PCs, modems, telecoms costs, internet plans.)
Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest.
> The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person
Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. A lot of the people I talked to on ICQ were from ‘poorer’ countries. Chat wasn’t really demanding on bandwidth
> Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile.
The first smart phones were definitely more expensive than the cheapest PCs, but when they did get affordable in the global south around the early-mid 2010s, ICQ was long dead
> It's just a scale thing.
More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
‘Social media’ was also a change in mode from relating to strangers to connecting to people we already know. But I don’t ascribe causation to Facebook specifically, it was just with enough time and enough scale (as you mention) that ‘social media’ was inevitable. Prior to Facebook I’d used services like MySpace, Bebo, and Quickdot, that have all since faded from view. We were searching for what Facebook came to be – a low effort way to share our experience with people we already know
> Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms.
My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age.
> Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end.
Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable) prices differed but it was definitely not something people in the hood or from Asian countries outside Japan and Taiwan could justify spending money on.
> More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
100%. I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph when the ability to contact anyone "anywhere" in the wealthy world became a lot easier and professional communications stopped being optimistic and instead expected.
> Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable)
Facebook era was late 00s, and didn't hit full stride globally until early 10s. By this point internet access was available to 1 in 4 people. Scale—in meaningful distinction to 'the old web'—had well and truly already arrived. The average Joe and Jane were using the internet.
> I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph
As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message". He also coined the term 'information overload' in the 60s when talking about the uptake of radio and television. Ever since the printing press, regular people have been gaining access to information at increasing volume, and not only those of means. However, the particular medium of the internet changed the means of accessing, generating and interacting with information and communicating other people. What McLuhan was pointing out by "The medium is the message" is that every medium has its own flavor, and it's own particular impact on society.
And for the internet it hasn't just been one impact: the rise of email and mailing lists, chat applications, internet-wide keyword search, social media, smartphones and apps, dating apps, AirBnB, Uber.. the fabric of social order is being disrupted again and again by the internet in a manner exceptional to other media. Sometimes it's even hard to see what changes have taken place. To take one example, the rise of dating apps has had a real impact on the profits and kinds of late night venues.
So, to bring back to my earlier point, social media had an impact that changed how we communicate. It was certainly very visible to me at the time. I think in particular with ICQ, it provided a means for strangers to meet and fostered connections outside of our respective bubbles, and for that I remember it fondly, and also worry a bit more about our world as it becomes more fragmented and isolated along social borders.
