Reading all of these articles about how the Internet and social
networking has enormously impacted out society and how we interact with each
other, I began to wonder what a world without the Internet would be. Even
though I did not have Internet or a computer for a decent portion of my
childhood, I find this very difficult to picture this Internet-less world.
It seems that online or virtual dating would still be a thing
though maybe not as popular. In 1879 a fictional book was published entitled, Wired Love. This novel was about two
telegraph operators from distant towns who have connected over telegraph wires
over an extended period of time. Besides the focus on ridiculously outdated
equipment like a telegraph, this sounds exactly like something that could
happen today either using a dating website, live video gaming, or a number of
other social media outlets.
It seems like it would almost be nice to live in a world
without Internet (there would have to be a few pros compared to the hundreds of
cons if this was in fact a real thing). I feel like I would be immensely more productive
with my day and be able to focus on school work a lot more than I do currently.
I would have more face to face or phone conversations with friends and family.
Even with these benefits though there is one thing that is
too great a thing to even contemplate the Internet not being around anymore. That
thing is the vast amount of information that is available literally at a click
of a button. My friend who goes to school in the Midwest informed me that
Lancaster County, PA (our home county) has a higher population than the entire
state of Wyoming. I immediately googled the populations of each area and found
out my friend was wrong, though not by much. Thinking about how easy that lame
fun fact was to research and verify made me think of how in the world people
learned anything even 20 years ago. How would people find the current
population of Wyoming? You can’t necessarily trust your printed encyclopedia
since most of the time the publication year was far older than is trustworthy.
Where would you find the year to year and decade to decade census information?
While people did somehow learn where to find the answers to
any of these questions, I think my biggest question is where did people find
the time?
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