Nowadays, if I'm too sick to be around people, I'll browse facebook and post the odd humourous status update reply, and maybe a picture/video of myself doing something awesome that I want to show off. (during the extremely rare circumstances that I ever do have a picture/video of me taken) Before, I'd have no means of contacting them whatsoever. Imagine if these forums were gone. Would anyone here communicate with each other via phone/e-mail? I doubt it. Unless you were very close with maybe one or two people on the forums, or knew them outside the forums, you wouldn't be able to have conversations like this. True, there's no substitute for real, face to face interaction with people, but facebook is at least better than nothing.
Before we had the internet on cable, I tried to play Diablo on the internet with a friend using our phone lines to set up a game. I'd make the game, wait about 10-15 minutes, and then when he didn't appear in my game, I'd call him to find out what happened, only for the line to be busy because he was on the internet, despite not being in my game.
I still see people going for the occasional jog where I live, and when I was younger, I was never able to get together a group of people to play soccer/road hockey in the field/street.
Before I got my first smartphone (which was a couple of months ago, and I'm 22), I would scribble down grocery lists, to do lists, and records of various things I wanted to remember onto whatever paper happened to be lying around. Now, I can neatly organize them on my phone without constantly having to go to the store to buy more stationaries and looking for them when I need to remember something. It also helps when I go out of town for a while that I don't have to remember to bring my MP3 player, camera, pen and paper, alarm clock, USB drive, etc.
