At a university in the US, a professor assigned his students assignments that allowed them to access experiential experiences that could then be discussed in class.
Before 2008, he often challenged his students to stay away from the internet for 48 hours and then discuss the ways in which this abstinence affected them.
However, when the professor returned to work after a year-long leave of absence, things had changed.
When he tried to suggest something similar, there was a huge outcry from the students, who declared that such a thing would be impossible, while emphasizing that staying “off” for an entire weekend would prevent them from completing their assignments for other courses, would ruin their social lives, and would cause concern among their families and friends, who would surely think that something bad had happened to them.
The question, then, seems more relevant than ever now that our daily lives are the epitome of nonstop connectivity: what would really happen if the internet took a day off? “One of the biggest problems of our time is that people take the internet for granted—they still don’t understand the extent to which we’ve allowed it to infiltrate every aspect of our lives,” explains William Dutton of the University of Michigan.
As he puts it, “they can’t even imagine not having access to it.”
Theoretically, we could be deprived of it on a global or national scale, and even for a period of time.
But before we panic, in some cases, forced abstinence from the internet for a short time has increased the productivity of employees in a company.
At the same time, in a study conducted on what would happen if a company faced an internet outage lasting more than 4-5 hours, it was observed that instead of wasting their time, employees did things that under other circumstances they would leave for another time, such as sorting out paperwork and dealing with other pending matters, for which the Internet is unnecessary.
Where a serious communication problem would indeed be observed, it would probably be in small businesses and bureaucracy.
In 1998, around 90% of the approximately 50 million pager devices stopped working due to a satellite failure.
“So what you have to realize is that we react to the idea of losing the internet, which is practically linked to our socio-economic position,” Dutton argues and continues: “But mainly, the internet is designed for one purpose: to allow us to communicate with each other.
We are now used to being able to communicate with whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we are.
Not being able to do that, of course, makes us anxious, upsets us,” he explains.
It’s the same feeling we feel every time we forget our mobile phones somewhere…