This brings me to a topic of discussion for all of you. How much different would your life be if the Internet vanished for a full month? Think about everything this flowchart touches upon: leisure time, education, work, social life, mood and behavior. I'm not trying to make this super serious, so just have fun with it. Simply imagine your life without the internet for a month. What would change? What would stay the same? I'll go ahead and start with myself:- Collectively, we spend 35 billion hours on the Internet every month. Every day, we consume 3x as much information as we did in the 1960s.
- 61% of us admit to being addicted to the Internet.
- We don't just do everything online. We do everything at once.
- At work: we change windows/check e-mail/programs more than once every 2 minutes. Most users' have multiple tabs open in their web browsers.
- Webpage shows image of how the brain looks when attempting to multitask. Obviously, we can't since the brain lacks hyperthreading. Funny enough, people still insist that they can multitask when they really can't. The image tries to tell us that by doing multiple things at once, our brains have to slow down in order to process all of the information at hand.
- We get stressed out and are unable to problem-solve. Our thinking slows down and creative ability diminishes.
- The "good" news: Google is replacing our brains.
- Collectively, we visit Google 7.2 billion times a day and make 3 billion queries. The author again reasserts that Google is replacing our brains.
- Without Google, when we needed information we would have limited resources (image of a book is shown).
- So what information we found we ended up storing into our brains. When we needed it again, we'd remember it.
- With Google, when we needed information, we would turn to the Internet.
- We don't store this information because we know that it will be readily available later.
- Therefore, when we do need the information again, we don't remember the info itself, but rather how to find it.
- If Google were to explode, so would our brains (insert pic of computer exploding). The author then moves onto social networking.
- Social networking has tripled over that past 5 years.
- We spend an average of 8 hours a month on Facebook with an average of 90 comments/updates/uploads with an average of 245 "friends".
- Of these 245 "friends", we only actually know 73.2% of them... and we only hang out with 4% of them. At least we're happy, right?
- Wrong. Heavy internet users are 2.5 more likely to be depressed. I'm not sure what units we're going off of with the 2.5 figure. We can only know that the author is trying to convey the message that heavy Internet users are typically more depressed than light/non-Internet users.
- They also suffer from white matter reduction in the Cerebrum (controls emotion, memory, sensory, & speech) by 20%.
For starters, I would miss Wikipedia and Youtube the most. Without my beloved Wikipedia (or any wiki-site for that matter), I can't indulge myself in fun, trivial facts. I could use a hard copy encyclopedia but those don't hold anywhere near the same volume of content nor would it be varied enough to appease my constant thirst of knowledge. Youtube is just there so I can look up movie trailers without having to go to the theaters every single time. I also watch old cartoon clips and episodes that I know I can't find on TV anymore. Without the internet, I wouldn't be able to find communities such as BWInt to relive childhood memories. Plus, it's not very easy to find a lot of people who are into Beast Wars in my circle of friends. My best friend loved the cartoon but our levels of enthusiasm are nowhere near the same. Another huge aspect of the internet that has profoundly affect my life since June 2005 is online gaming. As most of you know, I'm part of a gaming clan and we're really tight together (capable of posting 800-1000+ messages on our Skype chat each day). I don't mind singleplayer games, but playing with friends online brings a new fun experience.
Now, I have shared phone numbers with some of those guys/girls and we text many times a week despite never having actually met each other. They can still be part of my social life if the internet shuts off for a month. I gave up Facebook 3 years ago since I found it to be useless, because my social life is largely unaffected by it. Everyone I talk to is on my phone, and I see or speak to them every year even without Facebook. If I really want to share pictures or videos, I use my phone to share those. The hardest part of having no Internet would be talking to family members in other countries since it's significantly more costly to do so over the phone. However, I think I would try to compensate this by returning to hand-written letters. Yes, I actually used to do this when I was little
I still send Christmas, New Years, and birthday cards to international relatives. I figure that I can use a few more stamps on sending typical "What's new with you" types of letters. My work at the pharmacy won't be affected since we don't use internet, but rather, we actually use intranet (as do most companies). My work in the graphic design business will definitely suffer since I would have to fly around even more just to share concept images with clients. Either that, or I'd have to remain strictly local (I'll be moving to big city if that happens). Daily news and information would have to be done through newspapers again. My family didn't use CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc. until 2002. Before that, we relied on the paper for political news, movie times, sports news, and more. The paper in AZ costs $0.25-$0.75 depending on the publisher.As for personal behavior, I think I'd almost be the same but probably slightly less eccentric. The internet really does a number on your personality, although my real friends and family definitely keep me grounded. Currently, I spend more time with my friends in person than I do with the ones I know online. That's not to say that I'm not affected by my online friends, but if I were to cut off the internet completely, then my transition to becoming a "normal" person would be pretty easy... I think lol. It also helps that I refrain from keeping all of my real personal concerns/problems away from the online world, choosing to confide in those I actually know well in-person (or just keeping that stuff to myself). So to sum it all up, could I survive a month without the Internet and not collapse into a state of withdrawal or madness? Yes, I think I can.
