Our Worldwide Addiction

Katy is an ordinary high school student living somewhere in America. Even though she is only in high school, she is dependent upon the same thing as almost everyone, from the local mailman to the president himself. A quick look at a day in her life will confirm this. One morning, Katy wakes up and decides to skip school. She sends the day’s assignment to her teacher via e-mail, and then spends the rest of the morning researching college websites and their social pages. When Katy finds a college she likes, she books a flight and orders a new dress to wear while visiting it. Her mother asks her to prepare dinner, so she looks up a recipe, then uses Mapquest to navigate to the nearest Co-op in order to get the necessary ingredients. After a long hard day of playing hooky, she watches a movie on Netflix.
How can most people relate to this day? Certainly many of us do not have the luxury of staying home to purchase airline tickets and organic Co-op food, and most people are not searching for colleges. The answer is in the one overbearing giant which supported Katy’s entire day and supports most of our days as well: the Internet.
Now, it seems that this giant has stopped simply supporting us and is instead enclosing us in its webbed, unbreakable grip. The Internet does many good things for our world, but we have become dangerously addicted to it. If you can remember the last day that you spent free from the World Wide Web, you are a rare soul indeed. Now that we have mobile devices, it is even easier to constantly read our emails, check the weather, or update our Facebook status. How many people would be legitimately unable to navigate somewhere without Mapquest to guide them? Unfortunately, many of us could not make it through the day offline. Troubling as this fact is, it is understandable, for the Internet serves so many different uses.
1. A first major use of the Internet is work. Almost all businesses are run through an online system. In addition to strict business, everyone needs only walk across the room to his or her computer to manages personal finances or fill out an application.
2. A no less important use of the web is communication. Hardly anyone writes letters anymore. In fact, often online communication trumps face-to-face communication as well. I have even seen workers e-mail each other from across a busy office.
3. People seem to get 99% of their entertainment from the Internet. In addition to video games, sites such as Netflix and Youtube as well as Instagram and Facebook have completely taken over our lives on the entertainment front. What is this “board game” you old timers speak of?
4. Another common and quite dangerous use of the Internet is shopping. Its convenience is a double-edged sword indeed: shoppers might save gas money by not driving to stores, but they will definitely pay for this benefit in impulse purchases and return shipping fees.
5. Knowledge is one more reason we use the Internet. This might go overlooked, for in comparison to the other four categories, this seems vague and bland. We search the Internet for knowledge when we check the weather, read a news article, google the answer to a question we don’t want to ask anyone else, or look up the recipe for chicken pot pie. People even take to their computers to learn how to start a fire or to discover their own postal code. The knowledge of centuries is available to us in a small metal box at our fingertips.
Now all of these uses are very good when we employ them moderately, but the troubling fact is that many of us could not make it through the day offline. There is probably a good portion of people who would rather go the day without showering than to go the day without the Internet. This is cringeworthy. However, it’s easy to see why; the Internet seems to offer everything we need or want. We must ask ourselves the question, is it good to be so addicted to the Internet?
An objecting person could point out that we are not addicted to the Internet. We simply make use of its convenience. The fact that we don’t have to go to the bank to make a deposit or walk across the office to talk to our coworker simply saves us time to do more useful things. Why clutter shelves with DVDs and books or use precious cell phone minutes calling up our grandmother to ask her how to pickle beets, when you can simply type “Netflix” or “Google” into the menu bar? We are still perfectly capable of being social or reading a map if the need arises.
However, we are dangerously dependent upon the Internet. If the entire Internet shut down for a day, our lives would be entirely different. First, national security would be severely impaired, perhaps even shut down, because it relies on the Internet for communication. Notwithstanding this national crisis, our ordinary lives would be very different as well. First, almost all businesses would be closed, for they too rely on the Internet; secondly, we would actually have to talk to someone to find out what he is doing, instead of stalking him on Facebook; and last but not least, the zombie apocalypse would begin as thousands of white-faced people stumble from their computer screens into the sun, blinking and wondering what they were going to do with their lives.
That will most likely never happen, so do not worry. What we should be worried about is how our dependency on the Internet affects us on a personal level, as human beings. First, it makes us impatient people. When we become accustomed to the instantaneous ease of buying our plane ticket online or sending our grandma a “Happy Birthday” e-mail, we cannot deal with the inconvenience of going places or making small talk. Over time, the danger is that this impatience will carry over into our relationships with other people. Also, we won’t take the time to appreciate nature. Additionally, our dependence keeps us from being independent thinkers, when we can always google the answer to any question.
Now you may be thinking one of two things: either that this is silly theorizing or that we should abolish the Internet immediately. To those who think it is silly theorizing, perhaps you should take a second look around in the world, and you may begin to catch glimpses of these effects. I personally find myself becoming more impatient the more time I spend online. To those who say we should abolish the Internet, this is about as possible as doing away with all cars because gasoline fumes harm the atmosphere. In addition, we cannot ignore the many good things in our world that it has done, including bringing better security, saving lives, and yes, increasing our knowledge of the world around us.
Even though we cannot completely abolish the Internet, we should still think about the consequences of the time we spend online. While we cannot avoid using it daily, perhaps we can take small steps to keep our independence intact. For example, we could call up people instead of emailing them or navigate using only a map made of paper. Whenever we ever have choices between a click of the mouse and a face-to-face interaction, we should take the chance to assert our freedom from the online giant. However, in the end, we must accept this powerful force as a part of our lives. We can’t choose whether or not we want to use it, but we can choose how we use it.
Perhaps the best way to attain the good and avoid the bad when it comes to the Internet is to treat it like your coffee. When you drink one cup in the morning, it is easier to get through the day in your alert state. When you start drinking more and more cups per day and are unable to get through the day without it, this is unhealthy. You are constantly battling either a racing mind or a splitting headache, and you begin asking yourself how you survived without it.