Offline vs Online: How Life Changed in Just a Decade

February 6, 2020

It hasn’t been thousands of years, but some of us don’t remember what our life was like before the internet. In just a decade, the internet has completely changed the daily routines of human-beings. Here are 8 things that you most likely to do online. 

1. Rent movies 

When streaming didn’t exist, people would go to video stores to rent their favorite movies. Remember standing in line to get the DVD of your favorite cartoon as a kid? If you don’t, there’s a high chance you’ve been born into the internet era! Now you can watch practically anything without the need to leave your home! More and more people are now using online streaming platforms like Netflix which is present in over 190 countries.

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2. Follow fashion trends

Nowadays, following bloggers on Instagram or reading daily fashion news is very common, but it wasn’t always that easy. To learn about the most trendy looks, you would have to buy pricey fashion magazines. For you to get the scale, just compare that Vogue, the world’s leading fashion magazine, has 24,6 million readers per month but its digital magazine has 94,1 million readers, and in all the magazine’s social media accounts exceed over 118 million.

3. Research

Earlier, research for school or work was rather grueling. There was no Google to provide you with a quick answer to any question, and students had to spend a lot of time immersed in encyclopedias. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which equals to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

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4. Book airline tickets

Going to a travel agency was a common way to plan your trip in the past. In 2020, it’s easily done online with just a few clicks. Most of the time it’s also cheaper than approaching a professional at an agency. All in all, traveling has also become more accessible in just over a decade.

 

5. Call 

Earlier having a landline (not even mentioning a smartphone) was a luxury, therefore, people used to make calls via public phones (also known as pay phones) charged by cash or pre-bought public card. Such phones still exist in some places (in Ukraine they officially ceased to operate as of 2020), but almost nobody uses them unless in case of emergency. With a myriad of apps, calling a friend or a relative is often digital nowadays.

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6. Listen to music

Remember when you had to go to a store and buy CDs to listen to your favorite music?  Similar to the film industry, streaming platforms for music have been gaining popularity in the last few years. For an average of $10/month, you can listen to any music available on Apple Music or Spotify, for example.

7. Pay bills

People used to spend hours in line at a bank just to pay their bills, now this can be avoided by simply doing it online via e.g. a digital bank account. The increase in online bank accounts has grown in recent years, from 21% in 2012 to 61% in 2017 and the trend is only to increase.

 

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8. View and share photos

Looking through an old family photo album that your grandparents keep is definitely fun, but do you have any physical photo albums yourself? Unfortunately, this sentimental way of keeping memories is quickly becoming obsolete. More and more people prefer to store vacation photos in the cloud and share them on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook when they want to.

Photos: Unsplash