>When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it.
When was that? For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".
And if one was a kid or teenager growing up the the mid to late nineties, people had personal websites and online photos of themselves up regularly, and it wasn't considered much.
You didn't have regular snaps of your life, or pictures of the food you ate, like later, but you could well have your picture and nobody would consider it strange. Heck, even university professors and professionals of all kinds had personal and business pages with their photos on...
What you've described is part of the culture shift I'm talking about.
If you accept the Internet became popular in '85-'95 [1], someone 40 today would have been 3yrs to 13yrs old in that span so right in the sweet spot of their formative years.
As others pointed out, prior to the Internet there were BBS's, message boards, forums like CompuServe, AOL, etc. which were its precursors and what was known as going 'online' at the time. I did intend that to be included in my meaning when I used the term.
Of course I'm speaking from personal experiences and your own may vary. :-)
Sure, and one could be 80 and be "online" as a teen on his parent's ARPANET account.
But it's not the online kind we're discussing here, where upload pictures of yourself to the web was considered uncouth (as per the parent commenter), because it wasn't considered as good or bad at all, as it was just not a thing people could do at the time (not even BBS users were actually doing that, except perhaps in some incredibly rare cases where someone could get access to a scanner).
When was that? For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".
And if one was a kid or teenager growing up the the mid to late nineties, people had personal websites and online photos of themselves up regularly, and it wasn't considered much.
You didn't have regular snaps of your life, or pictures of the food you ate, like later, but you could well have your picture and nobody would consider it strange. Heck, even university professors and professionals of all kinds had personal and business pages with their photos on...