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Nov 16, 2009 10:49 pm US/Central
Good Question: What If We Lost The Internet?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―
It's a nightmare scenario for many of us: our Web browser just sitting there. The Internet is down. So what would life be like without the Internet? Would it be a good thing?
Last Friday at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, a network outage caused the Web to be down for 18 consecutive hours. The same thing happened for more than four hours on Sunday.
"I keep sitting here, thinking maybe if I keep trying it'll work," said reporter Heather Brown.
"It is withdrawal!" exclaimed anchor Angela Davis.
According to Forrester research, the average American is online for 12 hours a week, an increase of 117 percent since 2004. That compares to 13 weekly hours of television viewing.
So losing Internet access would account for a lot of our time in an average week.
At a St. Paul coffee shop, one laptop user said, "I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I actually think my life would probably be better in some ways."
Another recounted the time his computer went into the shop for repairs, "I had to start talking to my wife again," he laughed. "It was pretty dull without it."
"I can't imagine it," said University of Minnesota researcher Christine Greenhow, Ed. D. She specializes in the way young people are using social networks as a tool for learning.
"Today we know that the majority of Americans are online. If I was offline, I really would be feeling like the world was passing me by," she said.
A 2004 study by Yahoo found that people who had to log off the Internet for two weeks had symptoms similar to that of a death of a friend: loss, loneliness and sorrow.
"If you take that social network out, it can be like a death, like a loss," Greenhow said.
Many people we spoke with see the mixed-bag of the Internet.
"My days would be devoid of adult conversation but my house would be clean," joked Jen Westphal via Twitter.
So much of our business-life takes place online and much of our grassroots political movements start there. But the Internet can also be a major time suck.
"It would be quieter, maybe more productive but fewer folks to learn from," said Rick Mahn on Twitter.
"It used to be that people felt the Internet was socially isolating and it caused depression. Now a decade of research has shown just the opposite," said Greenhow.
Even the commonly held idea that a higher amount of time online has resulted in a lesser amount of face-to-face contact appears to not be true. An analysis of the General Social Survey data shows that as the Internet exploded, face-to-face interactions has stayed about the same.
In 1995, about 15 percent of Americans had Internet access, in 2000 that was 50 percent and in 2006 it's more than 70 percent.
According to a
researcher from Indiana University, "Social capital appears to be highly stable and the causal relationship between Internet use and face-to-face engagements seems suspicious."
And the idea that if we weren't chatting online, we'd replace that by chatting to people in person?
"If that all went away, I don't know if we would have enough man hours in our day to replicate that face-to-face," said Greenhow.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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