Days without Wifi

A day has passed since the modem in my apartment broke down. I can’t describe how terrible it is to live in a world without internet – it’s like a desert where you simply can’t get access to any information. I sat in front of the laptop, finding it useless and boring. I tried to do some cooking, and then realized I couldn’t refer to online recipes anymore. I wanted to write a blog, but I couldn’t use dictionary when having difficulties in expressing myself. Even if I planned to fix the modem, I didn’t know how to do it without online instructions. In short, everything sucks.

High-tech has shaped our lives so much that it’s hard to switch back. Now I can’t either process data or write drafts without online literature and database. But I used to write everything by hand in high school! I read hard-copy books, took notes of splendid words and insightful arguments, and tried to use them in my own writing. To avoid repetitive copying, I thought over every word before starting to write, and tried to make it as perfect as possible. Internet changes everything. Notes are largely unnecessary as almost everything can be found by Google; I no longer rely on my everyday life and traveling for new ideas, instead I browse Facebook and other social media to get information about other people’s lives. Deliberate writing is somehow outdated as updates can be easily done as well. But if internet is cut off and laptop is running out of battery, can I still write with a pen and a piece of paper?

Internet creates an attractive visual world in which things are both far away and familiar. We may bet that other internet users are people similar to us; however we are not certain of their identities, which is the most beautiful part of internet. Distance makes heart feel fonder, and internet caters to our illusion of mystery.  We’d rather communicate with “guys on internet” than talking to real people in our lives. People seem to be much better at listening to strangers instead of building real relationship with acquaintances. We cite ideas from someone unknown and use them to argue against our friends.

All that said, internet cut-off is not purely evil, as it obliges us to go for our sub-optimal as we successful “resist” the temptation of wasting time online. Gang starts to read a book that he has been planning to for a long time, and I finish the latest Economist in a few hours which usually takes me days. Victims of the broken modem – me, my flat mates and neighbors who share the same modem with us, finally leave apartments and chat face to face, sharing recent lives with each other instead of sharing them on Facebook; and we all go to bed earlier because we “have nothing to do tonight.”

It’s depressing to think of how dependent we are of instruments and how weak we can be without them. We, the creator of these tools, are obsessed with the pleasure brought by them, can’t get rid of them anymore. That does not sound good. I want to be independent, I want to still enjoy my life even without internet, and I should be able to do so as I had successfully done that before.

Thank god I still have 3G on my iphone.