Like mentioned in another comment there is a difference between patriotism and nationalism.
I would add to that there is a difference between loving one's country and being a fetishist of its flag or its national anthem.
You will find flags in all countries. The question is more what proportion of the population is obsessed with them?
I'm French and I can tell you that beside the far-right, who loves waving flags and singing the first few lines of the Marseillaise (most of them, like the rest of the population probably have never taken the pain to read the entire song, even less so to memorize it, too much of a hassle). For the most part, you will find flags on public buildings and offices. Seldom on private home/office.
Also, it's visible during special celebrations, say, each year for the 14th of July (France's birthday) some streets and stores will be decorated and, at least where I live (Paris), public transit will also have a little flag waving in the wind.
Last but not least, you will mostly see the French flags waved, this time en masse, during sport events. People will also proudly wear french colors on their clothing and on their face, or on their head (I fucking love this stupid hat, but Io don't own one). But then you will also see the other countries flags being waved by their own supporters, and most of the time they don't end-up killing one another ;)
Like I said, people barely know more than the first few lines of our national anthem, kids are not required to swear allegiance to the flag either at school. Some people are discussing about bringing that back but I'd rather see them bring back some traditional reading and math lessons, like in the 'good old days'... when kids actually were taught something useful. Because we've been suffering from the same issue you have with your US school system: it's falling apart, badly. Our kids aren't taught much if anything. More and more of them can barely read or write, and they can't do simple math. Let's not mention getting any notion of civic education, history, philosophy (which would all help make a more informed & better-equipped citizen, which is not that silly in any country that is supposed to be a democracy).
That being said, even without a flag, we're many to love our country, despite all its flaws, even those of us who criticize it vehemently. We just don't need to show that by waving some cheap piece of fabric, or glue a sticker on a some car.
I have bookshelves filled with books on French (and European) politics, history and philosophy. Sure those are not flags I can wave on the street or glue on my car to show what a true patriot I am but, imho, their non flashy content represent France (and the many other EU countries) a little better than any cheap piece of fabric put on a mast.
That being said, I have a pair of socks with a french flag on them. Could that count a patriotism? ;)
Early 90s. I used to have an email and I also used to connect to some BBS through a 14.4 kbit dialup, I had to pay by the minute of connection and that certainly was not cheap to young me. Then, came the WWW and demise of BBS, and then the marketing money that ruined the everything.
For me, the amount of crap is the real main change, as I'm mostly looking for the same kind of content which is text-based. Sure, since the 06s and YT I've also consumed a lot of videos but as far as I'm concerned this is something I'm getting rid of: back to text and a more humane and less corporate-owned Web.
The second change would the proportion of absolute morons populating the Web. There were always some amazing troll and some clinical case out there but they were amusing events. Now? they're on the verge of becoming the norm and that's as sad as it's terrifying: think Idiocracy but not in a funny movie and with real life consequences.
Speed of connection? Not so much. I remember my 14.4 dial-up modem but my unlimited high speed fiber connection (that cost me nothing) doesn't feel that much speedier. Why? Because all its amazing power is used to load a shit ton of tracking scripts and another shit ton of marketing scripts with almost every single webpage, and then the pages themselves are poorly (if at all) optimized.
Thinking about it, it's almost funny to realize the hardware is so much more powerful nowadays but the content has become so bloated with tracking (spying) and ads that it loads much slower than web pages used to, back then. That's what they call technological progress, and that's something we pay good money for.