I Think the Internet is Broken
Last night, I came home planning to conduct my pre-sleep email and ESPN-checking routine only to find that I had no access to the internet. My router said I had a good connection, but alas, no electronic mail or sports news. This led me to what I believed was the only logical conclusion: “Twitter has crashed and brought the rest of the internet down with it.”
Ho-Ly Crap!
This is a theory of impending doom I developed the first time I laid eyes on the fail whale. Was this an overreaction? Perhaps, but for a moment I started to think about what life would be like if the internet actually ceased to exist. While nowhere near comprehensive (I might be overlooking the bits about our infrastructure crumbling, mass hysteria, etc), here were the first things that came to mind:
I probably need to find a new job. I like this job, and I think we’re doing some pretty good stuff, but it’ll be difficult to be an online marketer when there isn’t an online. I bet there was a guy, likely named Phineaus, who was on the precipice of creating google for the telegraph. All of a sudden Alexander Graham-Bell comes through with his fancy voice-transmission machine (a name it goes by to this very day, if I’m not mistaken) and makes the medium obsolete. Bad day for Phineaus, who, like me, needed a new job.
A big focus of our work is actually on humanizing the world of online marketing. Ultimately, it’s still about making connections with people, whatever the medium. If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a home via another channel, though we’ll probably have to change the company name.
Are we worse off? One of the things I distinctly remember from my college lectures was a discussion of how people tend to grow into the capacity afforded by new technology. The example used was washing machines. Say people used to spend an hour a day hand-washing and hanging up the 6 garments they owned. Then the washing machine comes along, and that load can be finished in 10 minutes, giving them an extra 50 minutes of the day to frolic about.
That is one heckuva frolic
Solid in theory, but now instead of having 6 garments, you feel flush with this extra time and capacity, and buy more. Before you know it, you’ve got 100 garments, and it takes you an hour to do your laundry again. You’ve got more clothes, but you’re sure not saving any time. I feel the same way about the internet in a lot of ways. It allows me to consume an unimaginable amount of content, but honestly, most of it is crap, I’d be okay with less, and it’s probably costing me more time than it’s saving.
Some other brief considerations:
What will happen to my Webkinz?
Without Hulu, will somebody step in and provide a stand-alone viewing device for these shows? I hope they do and it can fit into my living room.
What would you miss most of all if the internet went down?
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