There was a common zeitgeist though. Not multiple fragmented views of the world. There was a common vocabulary to go with this understanding, and now we have many.
The ratio of signal to noise was much higher. It helped us form a common culture. Today, the signal is buried in so much noise that we're reverting back to tribes.
No, I don't think it's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle. The real problem is we don't teach children how to think. We teach them what to think, which leads to far worse outcomes. Having an indoctrination instead of an education and then facing a sea of pretty-sounding pablum to sift through for truth will be terrible.
More specifically: we've opened a tome containing most human knowledge (in an unfiltered, messy hash stripped of truthfulness signals) and we don't teach children how, in that context, to separate wheat from chaff.
It's a hell of a social experiment we're all in the middle of (though to be fair, that's always true; television was its own flavor of mass social experiment with its own pros and cons, as was telephone, as was radio, as was telegraph).
We always had indoctrination instead of education, that's what caused the homogeneity/"common zeitgeist". The polarisation happening now is because more people than ever before are breaking free from that indoctrination, and realising that the whole of society is actually structured around allowing a few sociopaths in business and politics to farm as much of the common people's labour and efforts as they can bear.
What you propose would require radical changes, practically back to the 1980s, and wouldn't even really free you from anything.
Who cares if there is no internet if your cellphone can track you? If your car runs on connected apps? If your credit card & POS systems are networked? Security cameras and facial recognition are still things.
Just cuz you're not getting spammed via website ads doesn't mean it's not tracking you constantly and jamming subtle things to change your world view. Means their attack surface is smaller; sniping instead of loudspeakers. And if their only option is sniping then they'll get really good at it.
I used FIDO over telephone line. It didn't differ much from modern Internet other than scale.
If there're messages, there'll be Internet built on top of it. Unless there will be aggressive censors hunting for every sign of "unapproved" communication.
We could still have things like maps, messages, etc. that are all very beneficial.