I"ll mostly try to help them understand what life was like before the internet. edit: And what it was like to grow up in a house with a rotary dial phone, a tiny black and white TV that would only play what was being broadcast at that moment by one of the 6 or so television stations that existed in our area. That our only source of recorded music was a record player or the radio.
We were not allowed to watch TV until I was about, oh, 14? 13 maybe? I was in Middle School. Maybe that is why even today I don't own one and do not have a cable/TV package. It just does not interest me. No Cell phones so when we went out for fun in the summer we were free and unsupervised. But may god be with you if you were not in the house when the streetlights came on, else you got chores. LOTS of chores. Hell, for that matter we went outside and played and rode bike all over. When I was 15-16 we rode our bikes to the big parks, a 30 mile round trip. Good luck with that today, moms are raising their kids in a culture of fear and panic; they'd never let that go down now.
Good call, but sometimes even I have trouble remembering that time. Pre-cell phone is so hard to imagine. I remember when answering machines were a new phenomenon... barely.
I edited in some more stuff that will probably blow my kids mind in my comment. My family was always slow to adopt new technology. I didn't have a computer growing up, we were the last family around to get color TV or an answering machine. I only got a cell phone in the last 4 years. My grandparents grew up without indoor plumbing, central heat and electricity. The changes in their lifetime were breathtaking and it I'd say the changes in our lifetime have been breathtaking (yikes, we're only about halfway through it!) I marvel at the internet all the time. The combination of cell phones and mobile computing are amazing. If the only thing we got from the internet was Wikipedia the world would still be changed forever but it's so much more than that.