You know why it hurts? The shared culture aspects that we no longer have. Most of this video is music and movies. The album or movie came out and everyone knew about it. Even if you didn’t buy the album you could borrow it from a buddy. Movies were such weekly events. We created our own memes and bonded with strangers. These simple things are so fragmented now.
Things were different. Nobody really owned cellphones, and you more than likely had to resort to sharing a landline with your whole household, unless you had a personal (likely bedroom) extension. You'd spend hours talking to friends and family on the phone, sometimes doing three-way calls. Luckily, you'd keep an address and telephone number book for those informations you didn't memorize. The Yellow Pages also came in handy. If there was Internet, AIM was used to chat, but it could be hard to find the time if your computer was shared (which it probably was, or at least stationed in or on a dedicated computer room or desk). Nothing was really done on the computer still, though; it could be used for music, maps, email, or the like. "Once you left the house, you'd literally had no idea what the weather would be like unless you read it in the newspaper or saw it on TV beforehand." Online shopping was not yet well-developed, and you had to resort to the stores around you or undertake a drive to a bigger city with better malls – a real shopping trip! If something was out of stock at the store, it could be special ordered – "the store would order it directly from their headquarters and have it sent to the store; they would then call you when it arrived (usually a week or two later)." "You'd schedule your week around your favorite TV shows. If you weren't home and missed it, you literally had to wait until summertime to watch it again in reruns," but you could use the TV Guide in advance, or check the newspaper for movies' times in the theater. "You'd pick up a magazine at the grocery store checkout (if you didn't have a subscription) and read it cover to cover. Usually, if an artist you liked had a new single coming out, you found out about it from radio stations hyping it up and announcing the date and time of its premiere so you could tune in. Similarly, MTV VJs would just announce a premiere date and time for a band or artist's newest music video. Or they would premiere them on shows. If you wanted to learn the lyrics to a song you liked, you would read the lyrics from the CD's liner notes or, if it didn't come with lyrics, you'd listen to the song over and over and write down the lyrics on a piece of paper. If you weren't already heading together to the mall or some other place with your friends, you'd agree to meet up at a particular time and spot. You always carried around change in case you needed to use a payphone if you were out. Waiting in line meant actually talking to the people you were with" – lines could be long, depending on whether the going-on was popular enough – or reading the must-have paper map. "You couldn't fact-check someone on the spot. Most of the time, you either took what they said at face value or made a mental note to look it up later — maybe in a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or by asking someone older who might know. Debates could last for days, and proving someone wrong required actual effort. You had to research in encyclopedias and books in the library. You had to make sure you got to the video store early on Fridays if you and your family wanted to rent the newest movie released. Sharing photos with friends meant asking for double prints when you got your film developed — one set for you, and one to hand out to whoever was in the shot."
In the early online days, "identities were affixed to screen names —a sequence of nonsensical words, catchphrases, and letters, haphazardly capitalized or appended with a string of numbers. Avatars were our virtual stand-ins: highly pixelated, low-resolution images that represented our humanity in cyberspace. Avatars were fictive symbols. There was no presumption of reality in what they represented. Two decades ago, the human face felt unnecessary. Today, we can’t imagine, nor can we trust, online interactions without it. A face was once not only an over-share, but a potential liability for itinerant users, traversing across cyberspace. Anonymity was not just the norm; it seemed to be the prerequisite across role-playing games, forums, blogs, and chat spaces. Harassment was casual and rampant, but even the violations felt less personal and more random without a face affixed to either assailant or victim. A user’s identity was fluid to a fault; avatars and screen names varied by platform...
The "like" feature didn't come about until the mid-late 2000s. Reactions came far, far later, in 2016, more or less.