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I suspect we had similar exposures to the internet, and parents with similar caution towards it. Because my parents were also glad I wasn't out drinking, doing drugs, or getting girls pregnant. Although I'm sure my dad thought it wouldn't hurt if I showed at least a little more interest in girls, as opposed to being so intimidated by them.
On the one hand, the internet in the 90's wasn't as bad as it was now. The social networks you were exposed to were far more fractured, numerous, and heterogenous. I hung around a StarCraft forum, the Battle.net chatroom for it, and an enthusiast forum for Riva 128 users. Because back then a lot of video cards needed some aftermarket attention companies really didn't provide.
The pornography you could find sure was a lot different. It would take 5 nervous minutes of hoping nobody came home and saw me on the family computer slowly downloading a single grainy picture of boobs. It would have taken too many terrifying minutes to print it off to risk getting caught, so the best you could do was commit it to memory for later. If it even finished downloading, because it often froze somewhere between the neck and the row of pixels right above the nipple.
Things today couldn't be more different. Activist run most communities, and love bomb vulnerable people to groom them into deviant lifestyles. Porn seems dominated by bizarre fetishes that I'm unsure even existed back when I was a kid. And parasocial relationships between content creators (adult or otherwise) have horribly stunted the socialization of the people trapped in their orbit. The sort of guy who participates in live camshows used to be universally derided, not necessarily because of the pornographic nature of it, but because of how creepy the unnatural parasocial relationship is. Now everything is a sort of camshow in that creepy way. From the earliest age kids are watching twitch streamers, tipping them to get a rote shoutout.
I just don't think the internet was as habit forming, or interfered with socialization, to the degree it does both now. Nor were the infohazards on it as potent. We tricked each other into going to goatse. We didn't lovebomb the lonely autistic kid into becoming goatse.
I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.
I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.
I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.
I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.
I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.
Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.
Proliferation of porn is probably one of the most underrated social changes... since the invention of the printing press? Repeating firearms? Who knows?
It seems to me that there's a serious disconnect between the popular narrative and the evident reality about porn and its mental impact on the individual. Sexuality seems a whole lot more malleable than people want to admit, with the "weirder and weirder stuff" slippery slope being only one aspect. from the inside, it seems pretty clear that brains have different hooks, specific things snag the hooks and pull the brain toward them. Porn's pure reward stimulus, but the brain's reward demand is so high that even when a piece is actively trying to max out all the sliders, gradients still appear in chaotic and unpredictable ways, and the brain is smart enough to latch on to these and then chase them endlessly. How much is innate propensity and how much is acculturated is probably unknowable, but you can in fact be altered, and even consciously steer the process.
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Looks like I predate you a bit more than I thought then. What a difference a few years makes. When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet. I'm not sure widespread consumer digital cameras were even a thing in the 90's. I know my family, and no family I knew, had one in the 90's.
In the 90s? GIF came out in 1987, and it wasn't the first graphics format. Consumer digital cameras were a bit later, but scanners were around. Slow and low-res and often not in color, but they existed. There were even high-res color images as far back as the 70s, though you couldn't reasonably create them at home.
I thought it was clear from context, I'm talking about photographs I took. I, nor any family I knew, had a digital camera or a scanner at home in the 90's. I'm struggling to remember if our school library had any sort of digital scanner. I feel like I have a super vague memory of a loud, slow, bulky scanner hooked up to an Apple computer of some sort in another school's gifted program?
Bottom line, children in my region, in my economic class, had no access to digitizing photos of themselves to send to perverts online in the 90's.
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