Is the Internet Meaner or am I Just Older?

Megan Morrone
8 min readFeb 19, 2017

It was a simpler time. Before Facebook. Before the iPhone. Most desktop PCs still ran Windows 98, and people rarely sent me messages telling me how ugly I was.

I’m talking about the year 2001 when I played one of the sidekicks and occasional fill-in co-hosts on a cable TV network called TechTV. If you lived in San Francisco at the turn of the millennium, you might remember that the network started as ZDTV from Ziff-Davis, a well known tech publisher. Execs at the fledgling network covered the city with billboards advertising a cable TV station that most people living in San Francisco could not get as part of their package. At the time, when I told people about my job, they’d never seen the show, but they remembered the billboards. The network changed its name to TechTV. Later Comcast bought it, renamed it G4TV and moved the operation to LA, where it morphed into a station that most people remember (if you remember it at all) for its video game coverage and shows featuring women in bikinis jumping on trampolines. But I was long gone by then.

Live from the TechTV Studios, It’s The Screen Savers

Before the women in bikinis on trampolines, there was the 90-minute live cable television show called The Screen Savers, a Car Talk-like program that featured the lovable duo of Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton, who would offer tech tips and take your computer questions. I was part of a supporting trio that in the beginning included the irreverent and whip-smart…

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