The Internet, We Wants It
Having had no internet here for two days, and with my phone lacking a data plan here, I’ve found myself more disturbed by the absence of internet access than perhaps I would have guessed.
It’s made me irritable in a low-level way, and it’s been blackly amusing to watch my own repeated stabs of annoyance as I formulate the intent to do yet another action that, I realize a split-second later, requires me to have internet access. Posting to my blog is a big one (one that I overcame with the help of friends last night), and checking email is obvious, as is generalized websurfing, but things like checking maps, checking times, checking things into version control—they do also, but are somehow in separate categories. Separate enough, anyway, that I would think of one and only realize a moment later that it was unavailable.
It’s not necessarily the constant contact with other people, or the easy access to mental stimulation, that seems most important when I can’t use the internet; it’s more broadly the ridiculously easy access to information that internet access affords. This is obvious, but the ways in which this access to information is taken for granted is becoming increasingly profound.
That, and I’m addicted to it. Easy access to social information, personal information, sports information, encyclopedic information, news information, entertainment information, shopping information, geographic information, dietary information, health information—I want it and am used to floating in a mist of it, data all around me.