Some of us got lucky a lot of our stupid, cringe phase was deleted from the internet during the huge data loss that MySpace had. And people back then weren’t on smartphones screenshooting social media posts to Digg, twitter, et al. All in all, I kind of feel bad for teens now.
Smart phones, social media and their terrible algorithms combined created a perfect storm for the most narcissistic people and traits to really shine in real time.
Back then, you had a camera, had to take out that SD card, load it on the computer. Then go through the photos / videos and slowly and painfully upload them on to a site like Myspace. That or some 250px flip-phone picture was annoying as hell to bring into your PC and upload it. Unless, you had a T-Mobile Sidekick and uploaded that shit via AIM… but I was too poor for that lol
Also back then, at least in my case, and because you had to do all that, you sometimes gave it a bit of thought on whether you should publish something or not. Now it’s just instant and you don’t really think about it.