Life without Broadband

Inspiring, Think about it — By Ryan on October 17, 2009 8:13 pm

Ever wonder what you’re life would be like on Dialup(although roughly 20% of you already know as judging by this poll: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=13943). There’s an excellent article that lays out a pretty in depth list of the differences between the online life of a person living an analog existence VS a digital one.

The amount of items people with broadband purchase online is 7 times higher than those people with dialup.

As you can imagine the digital life involves more of just about everything in some cases like email it’s only 13% more but in the case of say youtube or any video streaming it climbs to 3.5 times as much and with online radio or music the digital citizens spend 5 times more time watching them. The amount of items people with broadband purchase online is 7 times higher than those people with dialup. Just think of what you’ve bought online in the past year, tangible or not, the books you’ve read, the games you’ve played and the movies you’ve watched. I imagine that for everyone the ramifications reducing your net activities by those kinds of numbers are going to be different, however for the portion of us that live online as much or nearly as much as they do offline, they are huge. I’ve just become accustomed to taking in the vast amounts of new information that stream into my life daily, it has become normal for me. When you take a life where 8 or more hours is spent online each and every day and then reduce the amount of information taken in by 300-500% I balk at what I would not know right now, be able to appreciate or have the ability conceptualize. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination saying that new information comes only from the internet and that by being offline you are dead to the world, but the internet takes the regular stream of information a person normally would assimilate in a day and turns it into a raging torrent that has no limit. By information of course I am not referring strictly to useful or meaningful information, but just anything new be it trance music, failblog or a whitepaper on the internal magnetic structure of a fusion coil.

There are strengths and weakness of both the offline and the online world as far as the opportunity for new information goes and while I am not making a sweeping claim that one is always better than the other I feel that for a many people the internet will be key to their understanding of our rapidly changing and evolution world. It is the freeflow of information(and the death of Mao) that is taking down the walls of communism in the east, something that no army on earth would even attempt, it is the freeflow of information that is bringing societies together for the first time and it is the free flow of information that is allowing scientists to push science and technology beyond our wildest dreams. Even more exciting is that it is also what’s tearing down the walls of capitalism in the west, or at least capitalism as we know it. The foundation of the top heavy power structure of the world is slowly eroding from the ground up and it won’t be long before that weight on the top begins to come down(hopefully slowly and quietly). For this we have the internet to thank, as human beings become more of a connected collective the world begins to shift it’s priorities to what is best for that collective. Perhaps not as fast as some would wish, myself included, but none-the-less you can see that change taking effect, amplified in specific regions such as China. It’s an indication of what is happening anywhere as the human race begins to operate more and more as a primitive digital collective.

As for myself I have a achieved a perspective on life that has opened my eyes to infinite possibilities and infinite happiness. While some of this certainly comes from a childhood spent in the real world and with nature the catalyst to it all was being apart of this collective, almost like a passive education of my subconscious which led me to infinitely greater appreciation of the natural world today. My awakening was catalyzed by the rate of which information has been flowing through me over the past 15 years, each piece opening my eyes that much more to new possibilities and new understandings.

So if you are reading this you were of that 20% who heard the analog tones of a 56k modem before you came online today I would certainly urge you to reconsider your method of travel on this information superhighway. Faster doesn’t always mean better but it will certainly change the rate at which you are exposed to something that revolutionizes your thinking.

If you are humming along with a megabit or 5 under the hood than what I propose is that you step back and truly take perspective at the gift you’ve been given. What possibilities of knowledge and understanding are now available because you have all of human knowledge in it’s entirety at your fingertips. What are you doing with this incomprehensible opportunity that is being served to you on a glowing fiber-optic platter? Now take on step back further as all of this begets the question of what are you doing with this human life which is infinitely diffucult to attain and so easy to loose. Really think about it: Of the trillions of lives on this planet and you by some astronomical chance obtained a human one. Can you conceptualize the infinite possibilities represented with such a chance? I certainly don’t believe that you need to be online to realize this potential, quite the opposite, but it certainly helps to be online to find it. The Question is:

Are you looking?

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