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Technology Today - The Day the Internet Died

South Park, ever poignant, aired an episode last night in which the internet disappeared. Total chaos ensued when no one was able to check their email or talk on IM. Even the news stations were unable to report any news with the loss of the internet.

Click through to see the clip.

South Park Clip

In typical South Park style, this gets to the heart of a question many people have been asking… Are we too reliant on the internet. As someone who works in the technology sector, my gut response is no. But upon further inspection, I realize in some ways we are. I have had to instate an “unplugged” night every Monday to keep myself from spending every waking hour in front of the computer; I can’t confidently display/publish/send anything I’ve written without running it through spell-checker first; I don’t know how I would ever get to a new place without Google maps; and I can’t remember the last time I even turned on TV news or picked up a newspaper.

Instead of researching things ourselves and taking the time to figure things out, as a society, we now look to the internet to solve our problems for us. Even more disturbing, a lot of people have adopted the attitude that if it is on-line it must be true.

While South Park is meant to be a comedy poking fun at our society’s foibles, I can’t help but wonder, what would happen if the internet stopped working. What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:41 am and is filed under Humor, Technology Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Technology Today - The Day the Internet Died”

  1. Chris Says:
    April 18th, 2008 at 6:40 am

    Good stuff. Some excerpts from past blog entries I’ve done on this:

    What Do We Know Without the Internet?:

    Google - and the Web and Internet in general - seems to be changing how we think about such things. And I find myself asking more and more - what do we know without the Internet? There probably isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t consult some online resource for knowledge that I want or need to apply in my daily life. Thankfully, I still tend to view that practice as a “shortcut” around other approaches for gaining the same knowledge. At least I still know how to read a book, use a library, experiment and observe, call a hotline, learn from others.

    For More Information, Visit Us on the Web:

    Perhaps one of my biggest concerns about working in the Internet industry and website development in particular is my participation in a cultural shift whereby people are now not only just able but clearly expected to look for and find online the information they need to live their lives.

    You might also appreciate this:

    http://www.theonion.com/content/video/breaking_news_all_online_data

    Lastly, I have no idea if your blog comments support HTML formatting of any kind, so this post might look horrible. You might consider adding a preview function.

    Chris

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