Adventure, human nature and the fashion of the day
I was recently without Internet access at home for a week, apparently due to flooding at my local telephone exchange. I've heard that some people get very upset at losing their connectivity even for periods much shorter than a week, most recently in a Conversation article from Michael Cowling claiming that "we are all connected, every minute of every day, and without your phone you are on the outskirts of everybody else’s new, more digital, world." The local newspaper also ran a suitably angry headline on a stand outside my local newsagent towards the end of the outage. (I didn't read the newspaper itself.)
Frustrating as the lack of connectivity might have been on occasions, I actually found myself enjoying the adventure of a daily trip to the local library or city mall, where I could check my e-mail using WiFi services provided the local council. (I used to wonder what use public WiFi would be given that we all have Internet connections at home anyway, but now I know.) I was reminded of the days of dial-up modems, when connecting to the Internet was a minor treat, and I maintained a list of Internet-things-to-do to be serviced by dialling in for a couple of hours every day or two. The only really annoying thing, in fact, was that I fell behind in my Coursera studies due to an inability to download course videos over the public WiFi network. I was almost disappointed when the fault came to an end and the adventure was over (though I did catch up on my studies.)
One might suppose that I'm quite a different person to the smartphone-driven folk that inhabit the world described in Cowling's article. I'm certainly older. On the other hand, I presume that the video that Cowling presents to support the quote at the beginning of this entry is staged — not even the youngest and most gadget-conscious of my acquaintances or students behaves anything like the folks shown in it, and I'm sure that most people would regard those folks' behaviour as anti-social and obnoxious.
I recently went on a camping trip during which I was told that a young camper fitting Cowling's description had, in the process of this camp, discovered that she could, in fact, enjoy time without her gadget. One can speculate that I've just had twenty years longer than her to find this out, not to mention first-hand experience of a time when everybody went without a mobile phone all the time.
Perhaps being without the Internet appeals to a similar part of us to that to which camping appeals. I don't suppose I'd want to be camping indefinitely, though maybe I could if I had to given that I'm of the same species as ancestral humans who reached every scrap of land except Antarctica without motorised transport, electricity, or even agriculture. Similarly, my younger acquaintances can surely go without their phones for a bit, and might even enjoy it up to a point, given that all of us did just that only twenty years ago. We just need to remember that there's more to us than the fashion of the day.
