Could you live without the Internet?
Could you live without the Internet?
If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.
Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.
No email, Twitter or Facebook. No buying online. No stock trades. No just-in-time industrial shipping. No real-time tracking of diseases. It's gotten so that not just the entire Internet but individual websites such as Google are considered critical infrastructure, experts said.
"Nobody would die, but there would be a major hassle," said computer security expert Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure in Helsinki, Finland.
On Wednesday, certain websites, most prominently Wikipedia, went dark to protest legislation in Congress that would crack down on pirated movies and TV shows. It was a one-day stunt. But it raises questions about our connectedness.
The world only has to look back one year to Egypt to see what a sudden unplugging could spawn.
The government of Hosni Mubarak tried to stop protests in January 2011 by switching off the Internet. The shutdown halted businesses, banking operations and — at the height of the demonstrations — the ability of the protest leaders to organize and communicate with one another.
During the five days that the Internet was out, anti-Mubarak activists had to rely on help from abroad to spread their news and update Web pages. The outage harmed protesters' ability to organize or to counter government propaganda that portrayed them as agents of foreign powers, said Ahmed Saleh, who was in charge of managing the Facebook page that was credited with mobilizing thousands of Egyptians to take to the streets.
With the shutdown, the protests swelled as people unable to follow minute-by-minute what was going on took to the streets.
"No Internet meant that more people went down and realized that this was for real. The protests grew, and so did the anger against the government domestically and internationally," Saleh said.
He said the lack of Internet also allowed him to "live the moment" because he was not distracted with tweeting and posting on Facebook or analyzing the situation. This, he said, strengthened real face-to-face connections between people.
Nicholas Christin, associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, said that while a prolonged Internet outage would be uncomfortable, it might also bring out the best in people.
"I think you would find that people are very resilient," he said. "We would go back to the libraries."
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- Posted on January 19, 2012
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I couldlivewithoutinternet at home but not at school because it would be boring to read all day without internet at school i couldnt pay games or watch motorcycle videos game videos id have to do it at home which i can handel some but its just a computer
I know I could not live a day without the internet. I love going on the computer. It would be a very boering day without the internet. I'm always on Espn or Facebook. It would be hard to survive without the internet for a day.
living without the internet? ya i could do that. sure it would be annoying but that's about it. i am not one of those guys who lives his life on the internet. i also believe the internet has gotten too strong. yes it is INCREDIBLY helpful but we wouldn't no what to do without it and i think that is incredibly stupid.
i couldn't live a second with Internet. if it went away i would die of boredom. i hope it would never ever go away. A riot would happen if there was no Internet. how would we get power school? how would we be able to keep up with businesses, work or homework? don't take it away.
If the school didn't have the internet how would the teachers update the Infinite Campus? The internet is a good source to look up info for research projects. People use the internet these days instead of looking in books because it is more convenient. You can learn things on the internet and you can play games. I wonder what the world was like before we had the internet?
kids now at days say they cant live without the Internet which in not true its just their always on facebook they don't see anything else but i can live with out Internet there is a bunch of thing you can do you could go outside and play with friends and family you don't need Internet to do that all you need is energy.
I think that anyone would be able to live without the Internet. Especially because we use it for almost everything just a little time without it would change everything. My brother definitely cannot live without the Internet hes on facebook 24/7. I don't know how he can't do it. I like the Internet to but not that much i will use it when I'm bored or when i need to. But i think the world would go through a crisis without the Internet.
That would be horrible, having no internet but I guess humans would survive using libraries and other references like books. I still would hate it.
You can easily live without the Internet for a day but for business they'll have a hard time whiteout the Internet because most jobs need the Internet.
EASY. Come on this is an easy answer yes. You can do a lot of things outside. you can play sports, run, bike, take a walk . you can do all of that instead of staring into a computer screen.