They’d understand the word, but not the modern meaning. Back then ‘scrolling’ meant exactly that and nothing more; to navigate up and down in a webpage by moving the viewport.
If - as a time traveller - you said to someone “I just spent all day scrolling” then you’d absolutely get a confused what-the-fuck response, because the modern meaning of “endlessly consuming Internet (social) media content” didn’t yet exist.
People been scrolling since they got control of screens. The common term shifted from “surfing” around when connections got good enough to deliver content in a steady stream vs loading wave after wave, surfing connotated a level of skill in keeping the next one lined up and there were all kinds of tools to help with that. Forums, webrings, link aggregators, RSS. This pic would’ve been taken around the time of that transition and I feel like the guy in it was probably one of the trendsetters already scrolling chan sites at that point
They’d understand the word, but not the modern meaning. Back then ‘scrolling’ meant exactly that and nothing more; to navigate up and down in a webpage by moving the viewport.
If - as a time traveller - you said to someone “I just spent all day scrolling” then you’d absolutely get a confused what-the-fuck response, because the modern meaning of “endlessly consuming Internet (social) media content” didn’t yet exist.
The term as it’s used today, was also used in cyberpunk fiction written in the 80s.
People been scrolling since they got control of screens. The common term shifted from “surfing” around when connections got good enough to deliver content in a steady stream vs loading wave after wave, surfing connotated a level of skill in keeping the next one lined up and there were all kinds of tools to help with that. Forums, webrings, link aggregators, RSS. This pic would’ve been taken around the time of that transition and I feel like the guy in it was probably one of the trendsetters already scrolling chan sites at that point