Rough weekend. My high-speed data connection died on Friday, and I was stuck with a dial-up connection for almost 48 hours. Honestly, I spent most of the weekend feeling like my hands were tied behind my back using a slow dial up. While part of me was frustrated and feeling trapped, another part of me felt somewhat dismayed at just how dependant we have become on high-speed always-on connections. Which set me thinking – 10, 20, or more years from now, when more and more of our lives are electronic, when we’ll become totally dependant on whatever cool technologies are on their way, how we will cope when we (for example) lose power? Scary, huh?
I Have a Dependency Issue
5 responses to “I Have a Dependency Issue”
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yeah! do you know how many times I have fiddled with my settings to try to resolve my internet problems. I’ve reinstalled drivers and all! Now I ask my ISP cause the fault is usually theirs.
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I had my high speed connection die in the middle of a presentation I was giving to a company in Singapore. Imagine how slow your 56k connection is with domestic sites, then multiply that by 10-50 times to understand how slow things suddenly were.
As far as dependency on technology goes… did you ever read Plato? In the Phaedrus, he tells the myth of the invention of writing, where a god comes down and presents a great king with the technology of writing. The king recognized writing was ingenious, but initially refused the God’s offer, fearing the knowledge of how to write would cause people to become absent minded and lose confidence in their own abilities.
Angus McFee -
Well… just ask the people in NY… they’ll tell
you how it feels being without power 🙂
I am pretty sure they had bigger problems than
just their slow online connection 🙂 -
Actually, I know all about that. We lost power here in Michigan too (started at the same time NY last power, and lasted several hours longer). Ironic that I posted this blog entry just a few days before the blackout, huh?
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Very ironic… Homeland security might have some questions for you ;-))
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