Poof, it’s gone: The recent temporary loss of internet service took me back in time to an early computer blowou

 

Now they say phone addiction is leading to all kinds of mental health problems among young people. Which is probably true. They spend multiple hours a day scrolling TikTok shorts; keeping up with friends on Insta (Instagram; full disclosure, I have an Instagram account); frenetically languishing in a madcap, hyperspeed world of video games, violent images, and social media unreality, leaving real persons and others behind in their walled off fortress bedrooms glued to their devices.

But what about us older folks who are just as addicted, but in a more benign way, perhaps? This is especially true for people like myself who are rapidly aging in a world which, as always, revolves around youth, idealism, and infinite futures. This despite the fact that the world is going to “hell in a hand basket;” the most vicious kinds of war, including genocide and forced, man-made starvation, are gripping Europe and the Middle East; and large parts of our Mother Earth will be uninhabitable because of the extreme heat wrapping itself around the planet in coming decades, choking the life out of our “advanced” civilization. Oh, I almost forgot. The country is veering off toward becoming an autocracy, but that couldn’t happen here. But as long as we have internet…

So it’s a good thing I’m old. My world has become quite circumscribed since Covid. I’ve always been, I hate to say it, a rather “old soul” since I was a teenager, ensconced in my room with a vast stamp collection that was my pride and joy. That’s the kind of relaxing world of discovery I immersed myself in back in those long-ago, pre-internet days. I did, however, spent a fair amount of time outside, and went bowling, played tennis and swam at the country club.

Everything about that older world started changing dramatically around 1995. I got my first computer in 1996 and connected to the newly hatched cyberspace-age-like galaxy of entertainment and knowledge via a 28.8 kbps modem that slowly crackled with weird static noises that ended quietly, after which you were IN. Connected. Online. As in “America Online.” It got so that the pure ecstatic anticipation of modem sound became the tech sound of my life, the siren song of the late 20th century. I couldn’t wait to hear it as I sat at my computer desk (an old-fashioned, padded card table with a heavy, clunky Mac Performa desktop, later to be a futuristic looking but equally heavy cobalt blue iMac (circa 2000), which I thought was the coolest thing I had ever owned. I was in my mid to late 40s and felt like a kid again, with the ultimate toy right in front of me at my beck and call, endless hours a day in the evenings and early mornings of my night-owlish existence.

Now it’s 2024. I’m 73 and my lifelong companion and window on the world is my latest iPhone (Model 15 pro max) on which I do just about everything: reading, writing (with a stylus) watching YouTube videos where I can learn just about anything, taking photos (my only camera), dictation, and all the other tasks and chores of daily life I once did offline. My books are lonely. That’s big problem. When my cell service was knocked out for about eight hours recently, I tried to stay calm and carry on. But my little world was turned upside down in an instant. But turn back the clock? No way! I’ve even misplaced a book I’ve been meaning to to read that is titled, “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.” Do I really want to know?

I have to laugh when I think about how unsettled and disoriented I was during that 8-hour internet cellular outage last month. I wrote and am re-posting the following essay from 25 years ago when the seismic shock of a major equipment failure turned my tech world upside own for the first time.

From my journal, November 30, 2000:

I walked into the room this past Sunday, in the early evening after supper, unaware and clueless as to what the coming moments would bring. I turned on the power button of the computer. I then heard a hissing and fizzing, a most alarming and disconcerting sound, like when you drop Alka Seltzer in water, and then a cascading series of popping noises, like little firecrackers going off, and then the telltale smell of something burning, like plastic maybe? Surely, surely it was not originating right in front of my nose.

Unmistakeable. I had that sinking feeling, for I knew that my seemingly invincible computer, my mother board-humming, monitor-glowing and keyboard-comforting, window on the world was self-destructing, giving up the ghost, surrendering to the relentless onslaught of my insatiable curiosity, my ever-present need to be online and connected to that vast and teeming world that exists in cyberspace.

Stunned. Disbelieving. Turned off the power. Stared at a blank screen. Silently raged against the failure of technology, when there’s nothing godlike about it. After all, — it’s just a computer, a machine, an extension of my mind and heart and soul, that’s all, and it was gone. Taken away. Zapped in a hail of electrical misfirings, exhausted finally, after 4 and 1/2 years of endless use, by the oh-so-human operator — me — the wizard behind the curtain who kept manipulating the controls to continuously amuse, inform, delight and frustrate himself in front of that magical box. Gone.

The past few days I’ve started my mornings in an altogether different frame of mind. An unconnected frame of mind. No computer. No Internet. A quiet bowl of cereal and blank stares at the wall, and then the TV, the blankest wall of all.

Now I’m back, but I was changed. I saw myself briefly as I once was. It was rather nice.

That was then, this is now. It’s not nice nor pleasant, nor anything else positive when your main connection to the world is gone, even if for only a few hours, as was the case a few weeks ago. Life can never be as it once was. Try as I might.

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April 7, 2024

I’m agoraphobic, so the internet is my window to the world 🌎 y’know?

April 9, 2024

@cemeterydawn Oh, I can understand that.  It’s the perfect place to keep the world at bay while immersed in it at the same time.

April 9, 2024

@oswego Yepp. 🙂

April 7, 2024

We usually can seamlessly switch to cellular when the cable goes out and vice-versa, at least on the iPhone and the iPad. I wish I could have gotten the Pro Max, but the plain vanilla 15 is better than the old XR, which was on its last legs. I have made so many contacts of like-minded people in many different subjects that I see the Internet age as having more pluses than minuses. I particularly like the educational videos that are available; again, many different subjects. I can’t worry about what the kids are looking at, any more than I can steer them always from crap music (and some of that doesn’t even quality as music) to music that brings beauty to the world.  We are addicted to the Internet, but I’m also addicted to electricity. When it goes out, it is a shock to the system. I do worry about the country being taken over by autocrats, but I’m afraid our generation has had a hand in this. I’m always shocked by people or our age not being able to see the con man for what he is.

April 9, 2024

@solovoice Good observations.  The internet has completely changed my life starting in 1995 at my old job.  Even then I could not have done my job, or even enjoyed it the way I did without the internet.  YouTubes alone have opened up vast new worlds.

It’s too bad the younger generations expend so much time on useless, time-robbing and dopamine-inducing and mindless activities such as video games and virtual reality stuff.  Youth is wasted on the young, for sure.

April 7, 2024

I understand the role technology plays in my life, but I balance it with a lot of “low tech” pursuits, including playing guitar, hiking, cooking, gardening, calligraphy and journaling. I even teach a “low tech” subject: mathematics. We do use calculators to do some things, but most of our work is just a whiteboard, markers, pen and paper.

April 9, 2024

@ravdiablo Lifeis about balance and moderation, except when it comes to my passions, such as photography and writing.  I spend countless hours a day at photo sites online and working with the hundreds of photos I take each week, posting the best of them, participating in two online photo communities, and creating dozens of books featuring my photography.  Low-tech pursuits they are not, but none of it would be so possible nor easily available without the internet.

My low-tech pleasures are walking in nearby parks and gardens soaking up nice weather and taking all those Nature photos I love so much.  For the solitary person, using the internet all day is not an addiction but a way of life, actually, THE  way of life.  Low-tech social interaction with people is nice, if you can find it.

April 7, 2024

I try so hard to disconnect, but when boredom kicks in and there’s nothing to do, I succumb and give in to hours of mindless, entertaining, sometimes informative videos. Then there’s Reddit. Oh, my!

April 9, 2024

@startingover_1 Oh, yes.  I can see how Reddit can easily become addictive for people who like to comment and argue about everything under the sun.  I have an account,  but so far just dip into it occasionally to see what people are thinking and pontificating about.  Lol!

April 9, 2024

@oswego I am addicted to the AITA thread. It validates that I’m not crazy, that the people who emotionally abused me my whole life were narcisists, and I didn’t deserve it. It’s cheaper than therapy.

April 9, 2024

@startingover_1 I didn’t know you had been through so much abuse.  I’m sorry to hear that, but glad the support thread AITA helps you cope and validates your sanity, knowing others have gone through similar experiences.

Have you ever written about this here at OD?

April 9, 2024

@oswego off and on as needed. Re-hashing it just makes me re-live it, like PTSD, and nobody wants THAT.

April 10, 2024

@startingover_1 That’s true.  Same with my writing about depression.

April 11, 2024

When I first started writing on Open Diary many years ago, I worried about addiction. I spent many hours on Open Diary but in return I received much needed support. Don’t know what I would have done without Open Diary.

April 12, 2024

@wildrose_2 I agree completely.  Open Diary was my longtime lifeline to interesting and fascinating, and very caring people.  Writing there has been and still is the most important thing I’ve ever done.