DIGITAL LIFE

What would an internet quarantine of the 2000s look like? 

The movement of social isolation caused by the new coronavirus confined many people at home, but several restrictions were eased by technology. Instant communication connects friends and co-workers, while delivery apps and ecommerce sites allow consumption to proceed. Streaming video and music services ensure some distraction. But what if the current pandemic had arrived in the early 2000s, when the pillars of the current internet were still forming? What would the world look like with slower connections, without social networks and videos explaining how we do everything at home – from a bread recipe to a gym class, to the ubiquitous lives?
A good tip to understand what this parallel universe would look like comes precisely from those who first suffered with the coronavirus: China. Between 2002 and 2003, the Asian country had already been paralyzed by another epidemic, that of Sars. The Chinese were locked away at home to protect themselves and the move ended up boosting domestic e-commerce - which gave muscle for a small local company to become a global giant: Alibaba. (The company's breakout growth helped a Japanese investor become another giant. His name was Masayoshi Son, the owner of SoftBank). Here in Brazil, however, the scenario was different: there were times when only 12.8% of homes had access to the internet, according to the first survey ICT households, conducted in 2005 by the information and Communication Center (NIC.br). of the universe of connected homes, only 40% had a broadband connection. The rest? Internet dialed, with the charge of pulses every minute. Most Brazilians could even access the network through school, at work, in the home of third parties or in spaces that sold their online presence, for a few moments: the lan houses, which began to take off at the time. ” In the early 2000s, the internet was quarantined, " says Carlos Affonso Souza, director of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro (ITS-Rio). He refers to the fact that, in addition to the connection being rare, it also almost always happened by a desktop computer, often shared by the whole family. “We needed to go as far as the internet was. Today, the network accompanies us by mobile phone all the time,” he says.
For Souza, the days in quarantine in 2004 or 2005 would seem to be longer, because we wouldn't be on the internet all the time. “The perception of time is stretched when we are not anxious and bombarded by information all the time, as today, " he says” The fact that the connection is not ubiquitous, on the other hand, perhaps became such an important excuse to 'pierce' the isolation as taking the dog for a walk. "By 2005, lan houses were already becoming an important internet access point. Do you think a kid wouldn't come up with a story to go to one of them and play Dota or Counter Strike?”, say.
Another effect could have happened is the inclusion online and in social networks of older users, something that took years to occur. In 2005, two out of every three connected Brazilians were between 16 and 44 years old. “The question is whether people who are now 60, 70 years old, who were starting to hear about social networks in 2005, would have become users, " says Mike Pearl, author of the book The Day it Finally Happens, which deals with the possibility of bizarre events such as the end of effective antibiotics or contact with extraterrestrial life. "That could have changed a lot.”



Orkut and blogs
For those who were online, it is possible that much of the boredom was filled in Orkut-the social network of Google had been created in 2004 and, the following year, already burst in popularity in Brazil. (To get an idea, years later, the site had a base of 30 million Brazilians among its users). "It is possible that even false news about the pandemic, which is now on WhatsApp, appeared in communities as ‘truths about quarantine,’ says Souza.
More than that: Orkut could be alive to this day, if there was a global interest in the platform amid the quarantine. "If there were signs of this, Google could have moved”" says Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, the company's director of Engineering in Latin America. But the account was not so simple at the time. In the early 2000s, Google was still struggling to make its search tool profitable. The company's focus was on that – and not on a social network with messages and testimonials.
Another possibility, aventa Berthier, is that Orkut could have been a pioneer of voice messaging. "What happened late on the web were the messaging apps. Was this possible in the world of 2005? The contacts were already there. How would it be downloaded? Dunno. A complicator would be to enter into an agreement with some large cellular manufacturer, but it was possible”" he explains.
The service created by the Turkish engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, however, would not be the only channel of expression during isolation. “This was a time when blogs were starting to lose breath, and the pandemic could have reversed that” " Pearl says. "Writing a text and distributing it to friends would be more practical than sending emails to everyone. There would be viral posts and a generation of famous bloggers about the pandemic,” he says. 

Audio, video and photo
For Ribeiro-Neto, we would also abuse images and videos, despite the low resolution. “We are a group species, which destabilizes when it spends a lot of time isolated. At a time of crisis and pain, we would supplant technological deficiencies to produce connections” " he says. It would have been the chance for rudimentary digital cameras - like Canon's PowerShot and Sony's Cybershot-to become more popular. And with them, photo sites, such as Fotolog and Flogon.
For a lot of people, a quarantine in the early 2000s was perhaps basically a period of voice connection, a last breath of the telephone age. Video calls were still something restricted. Skype, for example, was created in 2003. The first notebooks with built-in camera began to arrive in stores at prohibitive prices, and the webcams of the time had painful resolution. “By contrast, at that time it was strange not to have a fixed telephone line. My parents didn't text me or e-mail me on Family Matters. They called. Back then, social networking was a shameful habit only of teenagers, " Pearl says.
There was the SMS, of course, but it was expensive. "The telephony model at the time made a separate charge between calls and messages. Each message cost, which did not encourage its use” " recalls Renato Franzin, a professor at USP.
It goes further: orders at the neighborhood pizzeria would be on the good old phone hook. Delivery online, at the time, even came into existence, but it was difficult to execute because of bottlenecks in order and payment systems. ” The deliverers could not carry the card machine, as they were linked to a fixed telephone line, " recalls Franzin. Would Everything have to be paid in cash or in the check-remember him?

The last goodbye
If on the one hand, a quarantine in the early 2000s could have forced a movement of access and inclusion and created unimaginable paths for technology, on the other it could be the swan song of offline life for many people. "The people with the most money would be partially connected, and the poorest, offline. It's like today, but in different proportions. But I believe the wealthiest over 35, in this parallel scenario, would be offline. My feeling is that people would watch a lot of TV” " Pearl says.
He has good reason to believe that. YouTube had only emerged in 2005, still without the infrastructure and content enough to attract a large volume of people. Netflix was a DVD rental company by mail, only in the US. The consumption of digital content was mainly represented by illegal downloading of music. Videos were still the exception, although in the offline world DVD players were on the rise.
"Perhaps the quarantine of 2005 was the last chance that the analog world would have to prevent the acachapante victory of the digital. Perhaps, many would return to the books” " says Souza, of ITS-Rio. "And when we went to the internet, we would spend more time with what we chose to see. We would value more the content we fetched on the net.”

Bruno Romani-State Agency
Brazil