Charlie Harvey

The Kids Guide to the Internet (1997)

My new favourite video is this historical document, circa 1997. An almost unbelievably straight, white bourgeois American family espouse the virtues of "cyber surfing" in "virtual reality".

Whilst the outfits and the tech are certainly amusingly anachronistic, what the film really reminded me of was the fact that the web and internet didn’t immediately become popular. They required, like so many things in late capitalist society conscious propaganda before sizeable numbers of people were prepared to adopt them.

Well I’m off to go surfing on the internet [sic] in the vague hope that it may help me to "get in with the techno set". Whatever the hell that means.


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