I managed to track down Serial Experiments Lain and, since I only watched the first few episodes back in university, I decided I should actually watch it through.

Something which struck me about the first episode was actually the scene with her father being seemingly very excited to be presumably communicating with someone once getting online (via "The Wired", as they call it).

I remember how the early days of the internet were like that. There was something very engaging about just chatting with friends after a late shift, just with keyboards and ICQ. It was understandable why we had such techno-optimism back in those days.

Of course, early into the new millennium, that feeling started to die and now it is totally gone. Today, the internet doesn't seem to excite anyone. It seems to either be a distraction we use to avoid realizing that we are actually very bored and unfulfilled, or it is where we go to be infuriated or terrified by the terrible things in the world or the crazy things being said by other people on their soap-boxes.

I actually think that part of what made it so magical back then was scarcity. There wasn't much bandwidth, much time online (since it co-opted the phone line), nor much distracting content, just communication through instant messaging, E-Mail, and newsgroups, and the endless sea of actual information. You had to choose what you would do with your time and your bandwidth, so we all chose to do something we liked. As it became more like a limitless resource, we started using it in less efficient ways and to do things we didn't actually want. Hmm, kind of reminds me of oil, now that I put it that way.

Bah, I am definitely getting old since I am increasingly frequently waxing poetic about those days,
...Nights