For the past week I have been living in the Dark Ages...metaphorically speaking of course. Despite being equipped with electricity, ridiculous amounts of free time and a functioning laptop I lack the vital necessity of the internet.
Its weird how much we rely on the internet and utterly fundamental to our lives it has become. I am not even a particularily technology dependent person; I do not have internet on my phone (or I do but I have no idea how to turn it on), I could go a week at a time without using the internet in Tanzania without batting an eyelid and I didn't get Facebook till just before university. Yet despite this, I find my self going ten minutes up to uni several times a day because I can't do anything on my laptop except watch the O.C. ad nauseam.
I can't use Skype; so I can't call my parents (terrible I know), I can't use Spotify properly (I can only use the music that is already on my itunes- what is the point of that) and my automatic file backup won't back up without an internet connection. Whenever I used this things before, I didn't even know I was connected to the internet necessarily.
It wasn't till I was five that I even used a computer for the first time, I was about nine when I worked out how to use the old style dial-up internet, was around eleven before we got broadband and almost nineteen when I got my own laptop. Its amazing how in the past ten years our entire lives have begun to revolve around being connected to the outside world 24/7 and how cut off we feel without it. I have, on several occasions, watched old TV shows and films where characters are trying to find something or work something out and in a moment of huge stupidity, wondered why they can't just google it.
I'm not saying our dependence is a bad thing because it a sign of humankind's progress but I do wonder sometimes how I've got to this point where I cannot cope without being connected to the web constantly. I had a life before Facebook and was perfectly capable of managing my social life yet now I resent having to text people to meet up. I hate having to walk 5 minutes up the road to the library to check my emails and I've had to go cold turkey on my iplayer addiction.
There is much point to this post I suppose, its more a sense of reflection on how sad and pathetic I am to be so dependent on something that I probably could live without and did so up until a few years ago. Its amazing how something so much in the background and disrupt your life so irrevocably when its gone.
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