Pondering Life Without the Internet

Communicating with friends, sharing media, and researching information are just a few of the things that the internet has made easier to the point that it’s a daily part of many people’s lives. Yet such activities would take much longer, or not even be possible at all, if the internet weren’t around. I’m part of the first generation of people to grow up with the internet as an accessible technology already implemented into various parts of society. As the years went by, social media websites like Youtube and Twitter just kind of appeared and became part of my own life without question. For me, however, it feels as though the internet has always been around.

If I lived in a world without the internet, I would imagine that I’d spend a lot more time in libraries. Physical print is the only kind of source I can think could be used to easily obtain information about any kind of subject, so I would be hanging around in libraries to do work for school or to satisfy my desire to learn about random topics that pique my interest.  As a senior in high school, I consider the internet to be an invaluable tool for research projects and essays, and without it the most convenient method for fact-checking would be poring through stacks of encyclopedias.

I’d also expect my social interactions to be a bit different. The humor of my friends and I would probably be more reliant on our own jokes instead media like memes or viral videos. Without being able to display videos and pictures from the internet on our phones, I think my friends and I would make better use of the time we have together. While it can be fun, I usually don’t like it when each of us are looking at our phones while we’re all hanging out in the same room. We should be engaging with each other rather than distracting ourselves, and it’s possible that the instant gratification social media offers has lowered our collective attention spans. So in that regard, I think the conversations I have with my friends would be longer and more focused on a single topic, and to an extent what we’d talk about would pertain more to our own lives.  

Beyond my personal life, there would be a lesser sense of the vastness of the world, the sense of so many different people with so many different opinions all existing simultaneously. The spread of news would be confined to TV and print. There would be much fewer ways to individual to share their opinions or their own creative content. Yet perhaps this would give art and media greater value–given how quickly people scroll through social media feeds, delegating only a few seconds of their time to look at a drawing that took hours to make before scrolling on again, the lack of internet could be a good thing. In addition to that, people might be more self-reliant, without having their own bubble of social media that can be specifically tailored to show only what they want see and thus influence how they think. Yet the flip side of these things is the fact that people can share stuff and express themselves in ways that were never possible before. I think the opportunities the internet offers outweighs the detrimental effects it may have, as long as we realize the magnitude of what it can do.
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