In decades past I recall more civility in discourse.
Eh, I dunno about that. It may just be that being online gives people the chance to voice their true feelings unconstrained by normal etiquette.
There's also kind of a polarizing love/hate warring factions dynamic whenever something new comes up - where people feel pushed to one of those two factions and then that initial opinion reinforced over and over again by like-minded people, which produces a more extreme divide than what otherwise would exist.
Fairly deep conversations with coworkers instead of that perpetual blank 1000-mile stare into an I-phone.
Now that is a problem and it's less the technology itself and more a poor ability to integrate technology properly.
Smart phones are literally mini-computers you can also use as phones. They're supposed to be a convenient all-in-one device to lookup information and stay in touch with people. They're not supposed to be 24/7 distractions and especially not supposed to interfere with working and that's a failure in work-life-leisure balance.
Ideally, people are supposed to manage their own priorities and judge what they're doing to be more important than what's on their phone. Obviously, things haven't exactly worked out that way. Eventually, I think rulemakers and social pressure will discourage those sorts of bad habits, especially when people get hurt as a result.
Maybe memory fails but I don't recall so many immediate ad hominem attacks that make Twitter and forums so rough.
I do. It was a goddamn nightmare. The internet has been a mixed blessing in letting people call out BS and letting people propagate BS. I'm not entirely sure if it has been a net positive or negative, but I'm inclined towards a neutral or slight positive.
My YT feed recently presented "USA for Africa" to me. I can not even imagine something like that now, but I am always hopeful.
There was that ALS challenge and the tree-planting campaign, just of the top of my head.