I’ve been without the net for over 3 and a half days now, at home. And somewhat inevitably, it’s just when you don’t have something…
It’s at the point where even dad has complained that it’s not there. Mum, sure, she sends plenty of emails, she’s even on Facebook. Dad on the other hand barely spends time on there, and yet even he’s noticed. When you consider that 8 years ago, we didn’t have the net at all, and 5 years ago we were all too happy to be on 256kbps “broadband” (yeesh, really? who on earth would call that “broad” by any reasonable measure?), the change has been pretty drastic. I could go days without touching my mobile, but without the net, I feel unplugged, disconnected from the stream of the world.
It’s not even as though I do anything drastically important on the net. Between blogs, emails, facebook and news sites, all the net really is to me is a service to find out what’s going on in the world – mostly a world that doesn’t affect me at all. Events which matter to the blogotubes are given undue importance in my view of what is going on, and that can’t be healthy for connecting with local events. But none the less, to be returned to scheduled programming and nothing else is a shock to the system.