Would you vote to switch off the WWW?

[HenaLorne]

Just a lighthearted thread based on a dream I had..

..but if there was a worldwide referendum where everyone was polled if they wanted the internet and all IP technology/WiFi permanently switched off/destroyed forever which way would you vote?

Perhaps in my naivety I have this idea that it would drive people back to interacting more and lead to less social isolation. Nothing would have to be pre-booked online. Libraries would be more important. No more young children watching endless YouTube.

Of course it would slow down useful collaboration in many areas and limit communication in other ways.

It's a mad though but ..
would you vote ON or OFF?

On - otherwise I'd have to go and work in a horrible, noisy, open plan office designed for extroverts.

Off.
Life used to be so much better.

Never! I'd campaign against it.

I think this was good balance .. you could do online banking/bookings but it didn't follow you everywhere and every minute

I feel so sad when I see a queue of kids at the bus stop all looking at screens

I would worry about the impact it would have on women being able to get help, learn and find resources when in vulnerable situations.

A lot of mothers rely on internet based jobs to fit around childcare etc

Police use it to catch predators

I would also worry about abusers getting away with things more (especially high profile ones).

But if none of those things were a factor then I would vote OFF

I was thinking the opposite this week. How awful email is for work now. It's too easy to send someone something at any time, no matter what. It's 24 hours a day. You can never escape being at work. I work term time only in a school. I came back this week to a couple of hundred emails. Mostly marketing crap, but it takes ages to wade through in case you miss something because so many companies dress their emails up as something you need to act on. And in amongst the crap there was stuff that just presumed that someone would act on it. I absolutely refuse to look at my emails during the holidays. I don't get paid enough to do that shit. Unfortunately some of it is a shared inbox so I can't set out of office. There are people who email a few day after the summer term finishes and then send another snotty follow up email a couple of weeks later, when it is still the school holidays. We are on unpaid leave then, you won't get an answer.

Now that most households have 2 FT working parents it is even worse. Understandably people email when they are not at work eg in the evening or at the weekend. So as soon as you go in in the morning there is a load of stuff to deal with that's happened overnight.

There has also been a slow creep since Covid to whatsapping staff after working hours. I don't want to even get a supposedly "thoughtful" one from my head, wishing everyone a Happy Mother's Day. It immediately makes me think of work and sets my nerves on edge. So intrusive.

There is just no such thing as "business hours" or "office hours" anymore. No wonder people are stressed. There is literally no off switch.

Off. I'm old and wouldnt miss it. Negatives outweigh the positives.

No there wasn't. Porn was really a lot harder to get hold of. When I think back to top shelf dirty magazines or dodgy videos behind the counter, it seems like fairyland compared to what is easily accessible at the touch of a button now. You don't even have to leave the house to get hold of something. Impressionable young minds may once have accidentally come across their dad's dirty magazine hidden in a drawer, but an accidental watch of a porn video would have been really unlikely. The normalisation of some sexual practices is astounding, like night and day, or the difference between the Victorians getting hot and bothered about a show of ankle, compared to dirty mags of the late 20th century.

You're naiive if you think having a digital footprint is better because it means you can catch the offenders. Have you got any idea how much work goes into investigating a single offender, so that you are sure of getting a conviction? There is no country on earth which would have the resources necessary to catch all offenders amongst the tsunami of twisted and sick minds out there. It's not doable. The (twisted and perverted) genie is out of the bottle and can never go back in.

Off

def ON
for relative with diabetes who can upload measurements for the pump to work best.
another relative with a pacemaker who can have it re-set and monitored online.

Internet in the noughties was fine, can we just go back to then, before apps were such a thing.

Have I understood that right? You are in the same taxi that is taking your daughter to school but you see it as dead time? Pre smart phones, parents would take that time to chat with their child, though. Or interact with them in some way. I do feel that smartphones have taken parents attention away from their children, and vice versa to be fair. We seem to have been tricked into thinking that we must use every second of our time being "productive" or "efficient". But I think our personal relationships have suffered from the lack of every day social chitchat and interactions. And just being.

Not sure probably on

I'm not sure how society would cope with going backwards. It has been a fairly gradual change to go from paper based to electronic based. But the reverse would have to happen overnight designing of forms and things. Share prices and cost of filing cabinets and paper would increase. Employment of people in sectors which are now mostly online

Jeff Bezos would be lead campaigner of the On campaign

Agree, but not just crash. It would tank so hard it would make the Great Depression look like an imperceptible blip in comparison. The human suffering would be incalculable. Millions, maybe billions would die. You're not just turning off convenient personal bits and bobs like being able to book cinema tickets online and look at cat videos. The entirety of world commerce and industry relies on the global communications network.

I would like phones to disappear, I'm happier with my iMac, like in the old days, I hope it doesn't become extinct

Admittedly, if it was just the WWW as OP specifies in the post title, it might not be quite so bad. But "the internet and all IP technology/WiFi permanently switched off/destroyed forever" — utter catastrophe. Suddenly whip all that out from under society's feet and IMO you'd be looking at famines, plagues, wars, the whole medieval black death depopulation scenario.

@CurlyhairedAssassin my daughter is autistic. She likes to listen to her music or podcasts while on our taxi journeys.
Sometimes I take a nap instead 😂

OP, out of interest, you weren't thinking about overpriced Oasis tickets around the time you had your dream, were you? 😆Because I was lamenting dynamic pricing while all that hooha was going on and saying to DH "I wish we could go back to the days when the price you paid for an event was simply the advertised price at ticket release. Remember sitting in a telephone queue to a venue box office to get tickets to something? Some people physically queued to buy at the the box office too. All you'd pay extra over the phone was postage to send the ticket out, and the only price differences were to do with how good a seat you had at the venue. NOT according to demand. When the tickets were sold out they were sold out. None of this reselling crap at inflated prices. Sure, if you wanted to flog an unused ticket to some ticket tout scally at the venue on the night for cash then they were around. But generally, events were affordable for most people. You could afford to go to more than just one or two a year because of that."

Holidays and travel were the same actually. Holiday brochures were printed and the price was the price that was on the page. They didn't fluctuate by the day. It enabled last minute bargains of unsold holidays too. I believe flights were the same too. You paid the same as the person sitting next to you for the same seat.

I HATE dynamic pricing. It has just put up the cost of all the fun things in life.

But that's exactly what's so bad about it being in existence in the first place. Through making ourselves so reliant on it, we are helpless without it. We have put ourselves in such a vulnerable position. If the plug were to be pulled against our will, we are doomed. So I guess the more interesting question would be, if you were the only person in the world who knew what society would be like post-internet, would you sabotage its invention so that it could never happen in the first place?

Sure, you can make that argument. But that doesn't make it any less catastrophic if you suddenly remove it.

Edit: yes, your update is a different and interesting question. I think I would still lean towards preferring having it to not having it, but it's not as stark an option as the apocalyptic economic disaster the OP suggests

Off! It takes more than it gives imo

I'm loving this thread, OP. I'm fascinated by the WWW and all things internet. I distinctly remember the moment I sent my first email at university in1992 (to someone in the same room 😆). To me it was like literal magic had just happened. How could something that I typed on MY screen appear a moment later on someone else's screen? Witchcraft! I was hooked. Fascinated by all things internet. I used the early web browsers, played very early online games. Used it as a type of social media and even went on a blind date as a result of talking to a stranger online at the other side of the city. This was all new and interesting in 1992. Normal people didn't even have brick phones till a couple of years later.

I was fascinated by its development ever since, and impressed at every innovation. Wowed by Amazon. Google was the dogs' compared to other search engines. Even though I'd written my third year dissertation about how the internet would change society unimaginably and mean that even the very course I was on would become obselete, I was so naiive about it. To think that one of the major downsides I described was information overload. 😆

Sorry, yes, I edited as I realised that I hadn't really explained the reason I wrote what I did.

Yes, at my most paranoid and anxious worst, I am waaaaayy past the point of thinking of something as simple as economic catastrophe and rapidly heading towards envisioning a version of The Matrix. 😂

CurlyHairedAssassin I remember telling schoolfriends they should switch to a search engine I'd started using that was so much better and faster, and spelling the name for them — G O O G L E 🤣

Keep it and make people pay per byte. Social media would disappear overnight. Also people would suddenly realise how much they are paying to see adverts.

We're headed that way anyway. Lots of vested interests in making sure their (paid for) content gets through.