I'm old enough to remember what I did in 2002, online games and offline games, ICQ and forums instead of social media. So, not much difference
The mid 90's is probably more the time to blow the current generation's mind because that's when many households didn't have internet and virtually nobody under 18 had a cell phone.
Early 90s is probably when things start to look fairly alien from a technology and communications perspective. There are probably a lot of hints about what's coming but they're mostly not really realized and certainly not mainstream.
I had a StarTAC but nobody I knew had a cellphone but calling their home wasn't all that fun you'd probably get "why are you calling me?".
I liked a cute girl who worked in a bar. So I set my Windows computer to delay sending a fax but I picked my phone. I knew when I'd be at the bar and I got a call and answered it to EEeeeeeeeeeeee pretending I was Mr. Important. She didn't fall for it. lmao
In the early nineties it was a bit different: no Internet for me yet but I had already had a modem and I'd use BBSes. No cellphone yet but two of my friends already had pagers so we could "ping" them in real life at anytime and they'd call back on the landline phone whenever they'd be near a telephone booth. It wasn't crazy expensive: they were buying these on little jobs you'd do after school as a teenager.
In my case it's the early to mid-eighties that were way less connected: no BBS yet for me. We'd be riding our BMX 2000 (wasn't skating yet nor playing D&D yet) and playing our 8-bit console. And learning to code thanks to books and printed magazines. Landline phones, typically still with a cord but friends didn't have pagers yet.
In case of real emergencies people would drive to were they thought people were. Sometimes long rides. When someone of my family was killed in a road accident in 1986, my grandfather and one of my father's friend had to drive two hours to go announce my father the news: our week-end chalet in the Ardennes didn't have neither neighbors nor a landline phone.
The only thing I can't remember is if I would have downloaded movies or not.
The ipod was released October 23, 2001 lol.
This article is backwards. It is shocking to me how much things have stagnated.
Compare 1982 to 2002.