Is having no Internet access actively problematic yet?
At the party on Saturday night somebody mentioned that their job had banned all email access, so there was no point emailing her any more. Two other people chipped in that they were in similar situations. It took me a moment to understand what they meant - it was like being told they no longer had a phone number. I'm so used to email as my primary method of communication that I forget it's not a given that everybody checks it on a daily basis. How many people do you know who aren't contactable via email? I can't think of many, but almost all are in my age group. I guess that there are plenty of people with no interest in computers who don't want / can't afford to get a machine once they leave home, so rely on their job to access emails. I probably get a skewed impression of norms because most people I communicate with are by definition online.
It's the implied lack of any kind of internet access that seems even more bizarre. I guess it's because everything I do is strongly linked to the Internet, but I can't help having the initial reaction that they're missing out. If I think back over the last month, over the number of get-togethers arranged by email, or Strictly Come Dancing tickets, NaNoWriMo, finding old friends over Facebook, finding out about dancing medals, sharing photos on Flickr, reading about and discussing BA's crazy uniform policies - everything was done online. Sure, most of it would have been possible without, but in many cases it's the difference between a moment's idle curiosity and actively planning in advance.
I'm aware that's snobby of me, and I know I've been lucky in everything I have and always have had access to, but surely life's going to become increasingly difficult without any kind of regular internet access, isn't it? Or am I blinded by my own experience?
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December 4th, 2006 - 21:01
Its the last one… but its an attitude we all share in the ‘developed’ nations. Most people in the world don’t even have access to a telephone, let alone Internet.
By a strange coincidence, everyone in the developing world who has internet access also has $20 million in an account which they can only access by sending it to your bank account.
December 4th, 2006 - 23:38
Yeah, I didn’t mean for this to sound like a lack of internet access is way up there on the Scale of Awful Situations, but in hindsight that didn’t come across very well.
Are you suggesting they don’t? Because it always seems so plausible in the emails…Often they’ve actually been trapped in their palaces by armed militias!
December 5th, 2006 - 16:25
Nah…I think you can still do virtually everything without Internet and email. Being without a telephone would be much more problematic. How’s this for a tale…when my brother was born, my dad had to get a message to my grandparents telling them of the new arrival via their neighbours as they didn’t have a telephone line! And that was as recent as 1984.
However…they were one of the few in the street to be able to watch the Moon landings in their own living room…
December 7th, 2006 - 00:54
“I don’t have a phone personally, but we were the first family on our street to own cordless pyjamas” – Billy Connolly
I think the internet is a wonderful thing but I agree most things can be done without it.
Email just doesn’t beat picking up that phone and having a chat. Blogs are a valid form of expression but can feel distant and one-sided as opposed to a good dialogue between people face to face. For every inch of that ‘distance’ though comes a certain amount of immersion I think. An immersion which if not checked regularly can indeed skew one’s perception of the world ‘out there’.
Then again I’m a hypocrit, I spend hours blasting the head’s off clone soldiers in F.E.A.R and eat nothing but pizza for days on end during a session of Never Winter Nights or Oblivion. So I guess what I’m saying is… there has to be that feeling of escapism from the real world, not a replacment for it. But then that leads to a space in which one is perhaps more readily able to act out their fears, angers, desires and dark shades so I have no clue. What was the question again?