Try this and see what happens in your household… pull the plug on your internet router. How long will it take before there are inconveniences or upset people (especially the younger ones) …
I have been having issues with my internet service all week, and this morning it went ‘belly up’ – no internet. Having spent some time on the phone with my Internet Service Provider, they finally concluded to send someone out tomorrow (probably a hardware issue with the modem itself).
It got me to thinking about how we might fare if the internet were to go down, and it’s a scary thought…
During day to day ordinary life, you probably see others continuously checking their ‘smart device’. Without internet connectivity, they will actually have to look up from their devices and see and deal with the real world around them. They might even have to ‘talk’ with someone. The horror!
Could the public at large survive without their Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and all the other social media platforms that exist today? How long until they go into withdrawal symptoms without their constant social ‘connectivity’?
For me, since I use the internet to run this blog, it would cease to update. I suppose I could survive that. I also occasionally use the internet for streaming Netflix or Roku, but I could survive without that as well. Email would no longer work, but I still know how to talk and use an ordinary telephone. I would lose the convenience of occasional research using a search-engine, but I could live without it…
But more importantly, what about our infrastructure of commerce? Without the internet, most all commerce would cease. Store transactions would probably come to a screeching halt since many require networking with the corporate ‘mother ship’.
So much of our infrastructure is connected with the internet that the world as we know it would be terribly affected without it and all of the automated systems that work behind the scenes to keep the gears turning. And to think that we survived without the internet up until just a few decades ago! It’s amazing when you really think about it.
Seriously, it would be disastrous (nearly close to a power-grid down) if the internet went down.
The design of the internet itself though is generally set up for redundancy, however there are choke points of traffic (.gov NSA interceptions, etc…) along with the service providers themselves that could be potential critical junctions of cutoff or failure.
Anyway, seeing how I’m sitting here without connectivity today, I thought that I would present the general issue to think about. That is, our reliance on the internet. Can you think of other ways that we rely on internet connectivity in our daily lives – even ‘unseen’ reliance?
Now I suppose that I’ll hop in the truck and take this Word document and my laptop on over to the local McDonalds parking lot for their WiFi internet connection to upload to the site
Start now to make sure you are staying prepared.
Via: modernsurvivalblog
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