A lot of people on this thread are talking about "the web" and not the internet. Pre-www internet was just as peculiar and perception-altering.

In about 1991, my Dad got a job as a networking engineer at the University of Chicago. This meant that he obtained access, through USCA's Telnet protocol, to usenet newsgroups which in a lot of ways functioned like a text-only Reddit, only if no other internet access existed. That ability to connect to people around the world and share jokes, news, and resources was mind boggling.

Here's an example of what I mean: I was 11 years old at time and played soccer pretty much year round. The only access I had to soccer news or culture, though, was through the Spanish language television network, Telemundo, which broadcast one game a week, on Saturdays, and that was a game that had been recorded from somewhere in the world over the last month and played on tape delay. One week it would be a league match from Argentina, the next week Poland would be playing France in a friendly. That was all the soccer I had access to. There was nothing in the either of the two newspapers to which we subscribed, there was nothing on television news, nothing whatsoever. You could drive out to a place in the suburbs that sold soccer and jogging equipment and maybe buy a poster of Diego Maradona from the 80s. Just to have a connection to this thing I was interested in, I used to record those Telemundo games on VHS and keep them. Well, once my dad got that job, he could subscribe to football newsgroups and all of a sudden I had access to people in England, Italy, etc., who would constantly discussing league tables, players, etc. I still couldn't see the games, but I could start understanding how people around the world actually thought about the sport. It was access to information that you simply could not get anywhere else. The internet allowed you to eavesdrop and participate on conversations about all kinds of things: physics, fishing, the early Simpsons episodes, whatever. Because this information didn't exist anywhere else, you really didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to amass it, and retain it like anything else-- books, magazines, VHS tapes....During the summers, when I was off from school, I use Dad's office to print out episode summaries from the Simpsons (on a Dot matrix printer) and kept them in a three-ring binder in my room, just like VHS tapes....