Nah, it is a good thought. Well, let me rephrase... it is a thought I often have, and by that measure I am judging it as a good thought!
I feel the same watching old movies. Someone goes out for the day, and they are genuinely on their own, with only payphones as a connection back. A phone rings at home, and they have to answer it to know who it is. They have to talk to people to get information. At age 36, I am one of the youngest to clearly remember a pre-internet age, and I do lament it. Yeah, it enriches our lives, (this message board for example) but the sheer independence we get by not having that constant lifeline seems to be gone. Every so often I'll decide to strike up conversations with strangers to break out of my bubble, but I'll find that everyone else is just as disabled by the internet as I am, and I get the strangest reactions to such a thing.
I've often thought how to recapture it. Downgrading to a "dumb phone" is one way. Another way is to be deliberate about what we learn about. Don't take it for granted that we can look up quick answers about something... instead, put in the effort to really LEARN about something. Really learning about geology is substantially different than just googling basic questions about rocks when we have them. It involves reading, thinking, piecing stuff together. Make a real effort to understand things, not just being able to grab quick information when we need it. I've been thinking about how I can have internet fasts and abstain for long periods, but I'm yet to stumble on a sensible formula that doesn't pull me completely away from the useful, benign things. I stay off of social media (except YouTube, which is a grey area) which I think helps immensely. Social media stirs so much hatred, paranoia and discontent, if I could destroy it all with one press of a button, I would in a heartbeat without ever looking back.
Even the things that we thought were rotting our brains in the 80s were really not that bad. Arcades meant getting out of the house and possibly being somewhat social. Home video games were way shorter, and for kids dovetailed to their play outside of electronics. The TV, most people with just rabbit ears or rooftop antennas, seems laughably benign compared to the internet, or even TV as it is in 2019 with its massive size and resolution, and "binging" capabilities. VHS rental feels like a candy store in our memories, a candy we indulged in with great enthusiasm, but with far less frequency than we do now, even though we get far less pleasure from it now with Netflix, and the like. Grocery store tabloids were nothing in comparison to the conspiracy theories and garbage that circulates all over the place these days.
It might be a bit of a tangent from talking about porn addiction, but not much of one. Even if this thread goes ten pages and never mentions porn, it will almost definitely help people understand their own reboots by discussing how the internet has changed people's lives over the past 40 years, so I say it is a good thread!