Found myself in this thread and I started thinking about the nuance.
YT, Wiki, FB etc all existed before 2010, many of our staples even before 2005.
High speed home internet; 3G and 4G have been around fair amounts of time now.
You could play Kyocera Snake on the shitter or text on a Nokia brick when pay phones were still around.
Box, iCloud, and other SaaS and/or freemium storage solutions have been around a long time. Bluehost has been an option forever.
E-commerce has been killing big box stores since before the demise of the JCPenney catalog. Amazon shut down bookstores decades ago.
Zoom, FaceTime, etc, way before the pandemic.
I grew up in the analog world. I remember needing to make plans, print things, watch shows at certain times, yada yada… But the ability to reach in my pocket and pull out an untethered supercomputer most places I’ll ever be (including the fucking sky or under the earth) and to access the entire world’s library of historical knowledge, arts and culture in whichever ontology I prefer accurate in real time; have food, prescriptions, etc delivered same day; most consumer goods in 24 hrs; all my shit of all types synced all the time on all devices all the time; tell my house or phone or car what to do and a robot cleans my floor or whatever other crazy shit is happening with Home Assistant; you get the point…
Unfortunately, living in the US, I find myself defining temporal chapters by presidential terms these days. I know 2016 was when social media jumped the shark and broke the social contract IRL… 2008 was web 2.0 and we created the content, our digital lifestream, 2020 anyone with a MacBook could create chillhop for SoundCloud…
When did the web start looking like times square without ad blockers? When did our access and ability become so pervasive and encompassing? When did the dark web become more destructive than stranger danger?
When did we get here?
The internet became pervasive in the mid 90s, and “always on” cable internet started to be widely available in the late 90s. Cell phones became pervasive around 2000-2001, Facebook hit big with colleges in 2004, but the iPhone release in 2007 changed everything. Within five years, almost everyone in the developed world had a smartphone, and had instant access to the entire internet, a built-in camera, and were always available via call, text, email, chat, or social media, with an endless stream of apps.
2012 is my vote, that’s when the majority of the developed world had adopted “always on” technology that still stresses us out today.