Caught in the web

The lure of facebook is great

Okay, I’ll admit, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. Yet, I was alarmed to find just how important the Internet was to my general day-to-day living. I found out over Easter.

I had always thought of the Internet with a kind of detached disinterestedness. Okay, it’s fairly useful and awesome and all those other things, plus facebook stalking is always a fun way to procrastinate, but I didn’t understand how some people could feel the Internet so essential to their lives. I could happily go without Internet for a week or so, couldn’t I?

Of course, I only thought that until I lost it.

Over Easter I went away on holiday. There was wireless in the apartment, but I chose not to take my laptop, mainly because I was on holiday: I didn’t want to spend all my time chatting to my friends, however much I might love them. And this week was fine. I didn’t mind about not having the Internet, because it was my choice. And I was somewhere that was far more exciting than the Internet could ever be.

The problem was when I came home to find the Internet in our house broken.

After I had unpacked my things and tried to decide whether going to sleep wouldn’t be the best idea, I turned on the family pc to upload my holiday photos. I knew it would take a while, so I thought: okay, yeah, why not check facebook. Have a look at what the guys have been up to in my absence, maybe change my status: let people know I’m back from holiday.

It didn’t work.

I tried and tried and tried again, but eventually I had to concede the Internet was not going to play. It didn’t concern me yet, our home Internet is always messing up for an hour or two. Something to do with trees in the way of the signal, or something – I’ll freely admit I don’t understand it. But with every passing day without the Internet, I began to feel the effects more and more.

First it was the little things. I missed msn and facebook chat, however ridiculously unreliable the latter is. I’m rubbish at calling people so the Internet is my way of communicating with the majority of my friends and without it I felt completely out of touch. I couldn’t look up things either. Now “google it” is part of my common vocabulary, but it was no use without google. I would have to pore over reference books to find out something – a hardship when I was so used to simply clicking a button.

Then I got more paranoid. I began to think that people were sending me important, time-sensitive emails, and that I was missing them. It’s a weird psychology that even though I knew that there was no reason why I’d be sent important emails; I couldn’t help thinking that they existed, solely because I couldn’t see them. And then I became convinced my phone was broken. Without the Internet, I took to sending more texts, and when they weren’t replied to quickly (as happens every other day without worrying me at all) I decided there was something wrong. I became a bit of an obsessive person – and I didn’t like that at all.

Eventually I gave in, went to the nearest town, and logged on in the library. Guess what? I had about a hundred emails. None of them were even remotely important.

So I’ve learnt my lesson: we shouldn’t get lazy and rely on the Internet for everything. In fact, we should learn to rely on it for very little. While, as students, much of our social lives are organised by websites like facebook, and electronic resources are becoming more and more popular for work, there will be no other time in our lives (especially for those of us on campus) when all our friends are so close by. We shouldn’t facebook them, we should talk to them.

But, of course, the Internet is still amazing. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to write this.

Without it, That Girl from Derwent would simply be a girl.

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