A World Without the Web!?

These last five days with only my iPhone as an access point to the rest of the world I started to wonder – What if I didn’t even have that? How would my world change with zero access to the internet?

For the last five days I’d tell people that I’d been cut off from the internet but, in reality it was just five days without access via my computer at my house. I still could log on and check email, Facebook and Twitter using my phone. I could still visit websites like MSN and CNBC and other appropriate sites via my work computer so I really was not internetless. So what if I was? What if we all were?

If I, personally, was the only one without internet I think that I would quickly become reliant on TV, newspapers, radio and telephones for news, information and communication. The internet truly has made us lazy. We can get all of these things and more by staring at a screen in the comfort of our own homes and offices. Without internet I feel like I would have more time for other things in my life.

Does internet really make things easier for us to get to or is it a situation where we are in information overload and we can not focus on the things that need to get done? Check out my post Are We Spending too Much Time on the Internet for some information regarding current internet usage levels and how they’ve grown over the recent years.

Of course the scarier thought is what would happen if it was a global outage? If everyone on the planet could no longer access the world wide web? No longer trade stocks online, no longer bank, or pay bills over the web? What would become of the planet? Could we go back to the dark ages or would it lead to a chaos of death and destruction as people panic? Would planes fall from the sky?

I think that a world without internet would indeed have a devastating effect on our global economy, our social lives, our safety and our sanity. It’s sad to see how much we truly rely on the invisible waves that send information from Japan to Boston in nanoseconds, but we truly do rely on this technology. Without it we would surly fall into chaos.

I know most of the people reading this blog are either bloggers themselves, people stumbling upon it on StumbleUpon or people referred from Twitter or Facebook. With this knowledge I’d say it would be safe to assume that the vast majority of this blog’s readers are frequent internet users. With this in mind I would like to ask my readers a question – What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without ANY access to the internet in recent memory? How long do you really think you could go without it before you started to crave it again?

With that I’d like to just say it’s good to be back behind the keyboard with an active internet connection. I missed it indeed and I still had “some” access to it. I can’t even imagine life without it.

Image: wryls

Filed under: My Personal Opinions