1334: Blackout

Our Internet has gone down. Proper down, too — there’s not even any signal coming through the magic box on the wall into the modem, though the phone still works.

As such, I’m writing this on the WordPress app on my phone, which means I have no word counter and thus have to roughly judge how much I’ve written. (For those who haven’t been following me for that long, my personal target for these daily posts is at least 500 words apiece, which I usually achieve — it’s a bit harder to judge when writing on the small screen of my phone, though.)

It’s quite fortunate that we have mobile devices with their own Internet connections these days, as it means we don’t have to be completely cut off from the world when something like this happens. But I do always find it interesting to think back to a time pre-broadband when this happens — a time when you had to tell everyone in the house if you were going online, because doing so meant tying up the phone line. There was also no means of illicitly going online in the middle of the night, either, because of the horrendous screechy noises that modems made, and also due to the fact that all your midnight porn browsing would show up on the phone bill at the end of the month.

Sometimes I do think it would be nice to go back to those times, when there wasn’t the pressure on everyone to share stupid photos of pointless shit, six-second videos of someone being a twat or misattributed quotes and unresearched scare stories.

Then I need to look something up and I remember the Internet is an important part of modern life, and that there ain’t no going back now.