I've just spent the last 30 hours or so with no Internet connection in the house. Don't worry, I'm OK, and it's back on now. Things, however, got so bad last evening that both my sons left the house, one for an evening at the pub with his girlfriend and the other off in search of connection.
How did we manage without it? I have to confess that my morning routine was completely scuppered with the lack of www - I usually check e-mails, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc when I get in from my morning walk, but this wasn't possible either this morning or yesterday (I can keep up with Facebook & Twitter on my Blackberry, but it's a little tedious, and slow when relying on mobile access rather than wifi). I found myself resorting to... reading! You know, I remember back in the days of dial-up Internet (and even in the dim and distant days before the ubiquity of the world-wide web) that I used to read books a lot more than I do now, and that was never a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, I still read, just not as much as I did.
So much of my life, professional and private, (and I would suspect of yours too) is captivated by the instant access to information, networks, and social media that the Internet provides. You need to know something, so you Google it; you need to contact someone, so you e-mail them, and expect a response within minutes; you have an inspiring thought, so you tweet it; you've just had the most amazing sandwich for lunch, so you share it on Facebook. This is wonderful, but we mustn't let it dominate our lives (so why am I writing this in a blog that I hope at least some people will read?).
Perhaps this has been a kind of wake-up call to me to not rely too much on the web. But, there's a whole world out there waiting to be discovered...
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