When the Internet fails, do your Facebook friends notice?
We know it sends shivers up your arms to think about being cut off from even venting about it in a status update, Tweet or e-mail. There’s no way to de-stress with mindless minutes on Farmville or browsing the new arrivals on American Eagle. There’s no online television, music downloads or Blackboard.
Thinking about even a few hours without Internet can be disquieting and certainly sent this newsroom into an instant frenzy that turned bitter and lethargic when a temporary outage last night plagued the production of the paper. And what followed were, perhaps disturbingly, the five stages of grieving for our online world.
Denial: The error message loads on your browser. Annoyed, you refresh the page. And again when it doesn’t load, you type in a new browser, it gives you an HTML version of the page and you feel a bit of hope. You try again, close the browser down, restart the computer and your home page doesn’t load. You continue to type in failing addresses until you feel that if one more blank page of rejection comes up, you’re going to make a scene.
That is when the second stage, anger, sets in. Why would the Internet go down now? Right when you were finally going to work on your homework or catch up on e-mails. You have this one hour of free time to catch up on “30 Rock,” and now you have nothing to do. You’re sitting on a park bench with your headphones in your ears and none of your textbooks on you. Why me, World Wide Web?
There is never an ideal time for the Internet to play hard to get. However, sometimes, in the throes of desperation, we find ourselves in the middle stage: bargaining. We may be thinking that we’d feel better if only we could load the front page of The New York Times or just check our bank statements real quick.
Suddenly, you begin to realize the importance of Internet in your life and you feel dysfunctional without it. It’s like Bieber without a bowl cut, the Fourth of July without fireworks or Batman without Robin. But (sadly) there’s more to life than watching videos of kittens. Before Pandora, there was the radio — and there still is. Before online games, there was Solitaire and Scrabble. Before Flickr and Facebook albums, there was the great outdoors and people-watching at cafes. Before “Charlie bit my finger” there was babysitting. You can enjoy this world without all 500 Facebook friends to run and cry to. Although, it’s perfectly normal to shed a few tears. Your webcam stopped livecasting about an hour ago. So let it out and move on to the last stage: acceptance.
You can make it without the Internet. Don’t let a weak signal blow you off. Get on your bike and ride to a nearby coffee shop where the signal may be stronger. Or, you know, just embrace the break life is cutting you and enjoy a pace that moves at mph instead of Mbps.
