RSSThe Day the Internet Went Down
Apr 23
Life in Digital Internet Comments Off
I talked to my friends a lot. Our relationships were practically 24/7. We voraciously exchanged news on our personal lives, our jobs, our current reads, the latest bit of celebrity gossip. All the minutiae that friends talk about, not to mention instant availability for any crisis, major or minor. Even at work, we couldn’t help ourselves but to sneak in conversation here and there, hoping our coworkers and bosses didn’t notice.
Then one day, it all just stopped. Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, and zero. No contact.
Horror of horrors, the internet had gone down! Oh, did you think I meant that we talked in person? Of course not. That’s so not the mode anymore. Verbal communication is so last millennium. We talked on instant messenger, exchanged thoughts through Myspace and its online forums, and occasionally resorted to the entirely passé email. When something particularly momentous happened away from the keyboard, at least we could use our cell phones to get the word out--through text messaging, of course. Voice calls are hip-replacement, not hip. Rather than sitting at my desk and talking to the schmoe in the next cube, instead I can seek out exciting people all over the globe who share my interests.
But without verbal communication, or even worse without communication in person, have we been losing out on something and just not realizing it? Perhaps so. We stop in the middle of a conversation and pick it up later, since it’s all floating right there on the screen. Seems great, right? But in reality, our thoughts are becoming fragmented. Forming a whole one at any given moment and then stringing it together with others has started to become a serious drain on the brain.
If conversation is an art, as the saying goes, virtual media have taken it to an entirely different level. We find ever more ways to cut down on words, on letters, to reduce language to its barest possible components for communication. In a few keystrokes, we undo the verbal richness that thousands of years of linguistic development to which we are heir, sacrificing this wealth for austerity. The art being practiced is minimalism, stripping language of all the cues we rarely even notice on a conscious level, such as intonation or body language, all the fine details we use to interpret the speaker’s mood and create context for conversation.
In 1994, when I joined my first primitive online forum, it took me weeks to puzzle out gems such as IMHO, ROTFLMAO, and TSIA. I couldn’t simply ask. That sort of gauche behavior would have instantly identified me as a newbie (as we were called back then). And I admit it: I was hooked even way back then. A few years later, I got my first AIM account. I joined one or two usenet news groups. Not long after that, web-based forums became available for every conceivable topic in which I might be interested, culminating in Myspace and Facebook and a hundred other social networking sites. Along the way, I gained new friends, a very precious few of whom have retained some longevity of friendship rather than just flitting in for a short while and then disappearing again on the stream of electrons. But every once in a while, the itch does crawl up my back and raise a question: have I missed out on something “real” while pursuing the ephemeral and immaterial?
So what happened when the internet went down? For just a few minutes, we all rose out of silence. We talked. We communicated. We emerged from our offices and our cubicles and got to know each other. Each wondering when the network would come back online, at least we had something in common to talk about in the meantime. Maybe, just maybe, we all went back to our desks an hour later a little bit better. And maybe, just maybe, we remembered to at least get a cup of coffee together or even lunch once in a while.
