I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated,

Why do you think that would be exaggerated? Just curious to know.

Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet,

Don’t mix the Internet (which is the willingness to interconnect people through some communication means) and the technology by which it’s achieved.

I mean, if people on that planet can even think of ‘an Internet’ like ours they

1. must at least have devised a way to build their own type of computers (and those needs power and some kind of wiring in order to work) and digital data storage.
2. must have thought about connecting those computers together in order to do things faster/simpler or remotely and in a decentralized way (that’s how the Internet was created: to be decentralized, not in order to exchange cat pictures ;))

If they can’t imagine anything like our computers, then they probably can’t imagine ‘an Internet’ anymore than say a pre-Bell human being could wish to use a smartphone with 5G connectivity. They may be dreaming of some sort of ‘portable means of communication’, sure, and many scifi writers did back then, but it would not be something as specific as the Internet and that would be, well, scifi.

So, considering they have some kind of computing machine already and that they can devise the idea of connecting them together, they should be able to develop their existing technologies (and the protocols to use them) to communicate farther and farther away (how long was the first ever phone line?).

If they don’t have that, they probably don’t need global means of communications yet.

Keep in mind it was not that long ago that most news people would read in their lifetime was local only—beside wars, major crisis news were local. There was no constant need to share cat pictures with people living on the other side of the planet either, or to cry out loud in front of one’s phone camera about whatever personal drama one’s going through. Drama were already a thing back then, as well as sharing cat pictures (and porn, btw) but we did it with our friends or our family (maybe not porn) or at best within some community members who, back when traveling the world was not obvious nor cheap to do, were all local to us. So why would one need a planetary Internet to begin with?

What you call the Internet is very recent tech—first email ever sent is 1971 (54 years old), TikTok is around 2016 (9 years old), Facebook was created in 2004 (21 years old), Apple in 1976 (49 years old) and Google is 27 years old (1998), the first ‘smartphone’ (iPhone 1, is from 2007. There were mobile phones before that but it was the iPhone that changed the deal), and so on. I’m older than all of them and I had been communicating with people all over the world before they appeared. And I’m not even that old. In fact, our entire species have been communicating for a few thousands years already.

The desire to communicate, to create a network of connections between people has not changed much, the tools (and the cost of using them) changed dramatically, obviously.

As well as the type of content we consider worth exchanging (which would be an interesting discussion in itself).

I never sent much cat pictures through snail mail back in the days, nor talked much about my outrage regarding anything because snail mail was slow (and outrage never lasts much) and was costly when done overseas and so were phone calls (and so was taking film pictures, btw) and I’d rather focus that time and money on things I considered worth it—ie, useful/interesting to both my correspondent and I.

Thinking about it, maybe your hypothetical internet-less alien civilization is much happier (and healthier) than we are today with our constant dramas and low, low effort contents that make up the essential of our Internet? Just wondering, obviously.

edit: typos