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Even that would be too much of a culture shock for most people. Consider the cell phone. Now that they're ubiquitous there's some consternation that they intrude too much into daily life; it used to be that if someone wanted to get a hold of you either had to be at home or (in an emergency) another known location. Now there's nowhere to hide. This ignores the fact that before the rise of cell phones if you were expecting a call you were pretty much stuck at home until that call came. And when a call did come you had no control there. Caller ID existed, but it cost extra so few people had it. When that phone rang it could be anybody, and the only way to find out was to pick up. When you did make a call, you generally couldn't call just anyone, since there was a charge for anything other than local calls, and it wasn't cheap. And of course you can forget about text messaging.
While the 90s may be know for the internet's meteoric rise, it wasn't really a thing for most people until the end of the decade, and even then it was more popular as a buzzword than something people actually used. By the year 2000 only about half of American households even had a computer, and fewer than 40% had internet access. In 1995 fewer than 10% had internet access. And the most popular way of getting internet access was through AOL, which was describes as a "walled garden" since it wasn't true internet access but access to a curated selection of popular sites. You got this access via a 14.4 or 28.8 kbps modem (though broadband was available in some places by the end of the decade) that was slow as hell, and through a machine that was as finicky as hell. This was the era when you'd try to do something relatively straightforward—like connect to a new printer—and all hell would break loose with Illegal Operations and Blue Screens of Death while you tried to navigate the autoexec.bat and config.sys via MS-DOS to make sure there wasn't some driver problem or IRQ port conflict or whatever. And this "togetherness" was limited to the before time, when the internet was Usenet and was the domain of hippies and nerds. By the time normies got online chatrooms were full of drunken fratboys swearing at each other and flame wars over which pro wrestlers were better (I still maintain that Nailz sucked).
Re: cell phones vs. home phones, you do realize that answering machines also came about at around the same time, right? We literally had machines for being able to receive phone messages in the event we were called and weren't at the house to take it, I don't think the whole "trapped at home waiting for a phone call" thing was all too common even before the dominance of cell phones.
Dude, if you were waiting for a girl to call you back you weren't looking for her to get the machine. There's a reason Soul Asylum sang "Waiting by the phone / waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone".
Okay, but what about the 95% of the time where you're not looking to score pussy?
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I'm not saying I'd go myself, really - just that it wouldn't be in the same category as, say, answering 1917 or 1950 would be.
Also, of course, going by personal experiences, I started using Internet around mid-90s (being around 10 at that time), I'm fairly sure we had Internet at home before 00s, and was already pretty deep in the forums world around 98-99. Finnish online access was, of course, world-class from the get-go, with none of the AOL walled garden stuff. While I've had my fights with autoexec.bat and config.sys, that was more connected to (pirated) games to work than anything Internet-related.
There's a lot of charts like this showing that the time from ca 1997 to ca 2012 was basically less lonely time for teens than before and after that, and I hold that the most likely explanation is, indeed, that it was the time after it became possible to form and maintain friendships online but the online part of the friendship complimented the physical, in-person part instead of replacing it, which happened after smartphones became ubiquitous.
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