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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask you what you’d miss about the Internet

28 replies

Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 08:24

After another outage yesterday and lots of websites being unavailable etc, I’ve been pondering this - if you woke up tomorrow and the internet was gone completely with no chance of it being restored, what would you miss about it? And what would you be pleased about? I’m not talking about if the internet never existed, because you wouldn’t know what you were missing in that scenario.

For me I’d miss:

The ease of keeping in touch with friends through WhatsApp, etc
Gifs
Being able to read the news at my convenience without having to buy a newspaper or watch on tv at a designated time
Mumsnet
Online only games
Working out what else I’ve seen that actor in when watching a new show
Streaming tv/music
Being able to work from home

Benefits I can potentially see:

Might make me see friends in person more frequently if we can’t catch up with a WhatsApp anymore
Increased pressures to look and act a certain way might be gone
Online bullying - I won’t miss that!
Trades might see more people studying them as less people will be able to fix things themselves without a YouTube tutorial to show them what to do

I’m sure there’s loads more - but I’d probably then say everyone else’s too!

OP posts:
randomchap · 19/11/2025 08:29

I'd miss my job, and working from home

The Internet underpins so much of modern life that it's almost impossible to imagine life without it

HairOil · 19/11/2025 08:30

I’d miss everything — from online banking and being able to pay bills, book holidays, buy anything and have it delivered, browse houses for sale without physically going to an estate agent, look up directions, sat nav, Teams etc etc to all of the knowledge shared on there, from YouTube videos of performances from decades before I was born to Project Gutenberg/Interned Archive to Wikipedia, and all the serious knowedge repositories like online dictionaries, for free.

EnterFunnyNameHere · 19/11/2025 08:31

Well, the total breakdown of pretty much every aspect of life - from health care, to utilities, to food chain, to banking and more - would be a bit of a blow...!

If the practical stuff somehow could magically keep going, I'd probably mostly miss the "information at my fingertips" where you can easily look up more detail about anything that interests you. I would probably initially miss but the best grateful for not spending so much time idly reading stuff online though!

HairOil · 19/11/2025 08:31

randomchap · 19/11/2025 08:29

I'd miss my job, and working from home

The Internet underpins so much of modern life that it's almost impossible to imagine life without it

Absolutely. It’s why that passage about the last time anyone ever loaded a web page in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven is so chilling.

Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 08:46

EnterFunnyNameHere · 19/11/2025 08:31

Well, the total breakdown of pretty much every aspect of life - from health care, to utilities, to food chain, to banking and more - would be a bit of a blow...!

If the practical stuff somehow could magically keep going, I'd probably mostly miss the "information at my fingertips" where you can easily look up more detail about anything that interests you. I would probably initially miss but the best grateful for not spending so much time idly reading stuff online though!

Yeah obviously everything would breakdown because pretty much everything is reliant on the internet. I was more thinking on a personal likes and interests level - I guess it’s another way of asking what are your favourite things about the internet. In reality, it would be carnage if we just lost it with no warning! We would recover, and the world would be very, better different.

OP posts:
randomchap · 19/11/2025 09:31

HairOil · 19/11/2025 08:31

Absolutely. It’s why that passage about the last time anyone ever loaded a web page in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven is so chilling.

Thanks, just added that to my wishlist

surreygirly · 19/11/2025 10:08

There is zero i could not do without

Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 10:58

surreygirly · 19/11/2025 10:08

There is zero i could not do without

It’s not about what you could do without, it’s what you would miss. Ultimately we could all manage without it - we did before the internet. But there must be something about the internet that brings you joy, or at least makes life a little easier for you.

OP posts:
AcropolisNow · 19/11/2025 12:40

E-mail and online banking, the rest is very much take it or leave it.

gamerchick · 19/11/2025 12:45

I miss it because my machines get annoying when they don't have internet. Playing a game and having a little box pop up constantly gets irritating.

I don't think I'd mind so much after the initial detox. There's texts for messages. The constant online training for work would be reduced to worksheets and so spread out and we could go back to cash. Happy days. I haven't had online banking forced on me yet.

Bedheadbeachbum · 19/11/2025 12:46

Whatsapp, Facebook, internet banking, eBay, YouTube and Mumsnet.

That's all the essentials for me.

Sartre · 19/11/2025 12:47

Honestly, online shopping. I really really hate shopping in person, it stresses me out. I love the ease of clicking a few buttons on my phone and having it delivered within a day or two. You just can’t really beat that. I used to love shopping as a teen but now I get mega anxiety and find it a huge faff.

I’d also miss email because it’s the only contact I have for some people.

Bookaholic73 · 19/11/2025 12:48

Honestly I think I’d miss WhatsApp the most.
It’s the pace for my gym chat and also Work chat.
Apart from that, possibly Instagram. Again for the fitness and gym stuff.

MyIvyGrows · 19/11/2025 12:49

HairOil · 19/11/2025 08:30

I’d miss everything — from online banking and being able to pay bills, book holidays, buy anything and have it delivered, browse houses for sale without physically going to an estate agent, look up directions, sat nav, Teams etc etc to all of the knowledge shared on there, from YouTube videos of performances from decades before I was born to Project Gutenberg/Interned Archive to Wikipedia, and all the serious knowedge repositories like online dictionaries, for free.

This. It’s a prospect too horrifying to think about really.

CranfordScones · 19/11/2025 13:35

Quick access to knowledge and information. Even with reference books, you often have to know precisely what you're looking for. Modern search - you just headbutt the keyboard and it's: "Did you mean the Treaty of Lisbon (1667)?" - Err, Yes!

Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 14:08

Sartre · 19/11/2025 12:47

Honestly, online shopping. I really really hate shopping in person, it stresses me out. I love the ease of clicking a few buttons on my phone and having it delivered within a day or two. You just can’t really beat that. I used to love shopping as a teen but now I get mega anxiety and find it a huge faff.

I’d also miss email because it’s the only contact I have for some people.

I’m the same with shopping! I used to love trawling the shops, finding the perfect gift, coming home exhausted with loads of bags… these days it just feels busier than it used to and online is so much easier!

OP posts:
Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 14:09

CranfordScones · 19/11/2025 13:35

Quick access to knowledge and information. Even with reference books, you often have to know precisely what you're looking for. Modern search - you just headbutt the keyboard and it's: "Did you mean the Treaty of Lisbon (1667)?" - Err, Yes!

😂😂😂😂 it is a little scary that sometimes it appears to read your mind. But it’s also very useful!

OP posts:
GooseyGandalf · 19/11/2025 14:43

I’d miss it in research - being able to immediately look up answers as soon as a question occurs to me is a joy. When I read an academic paper now, lots of questions occur to me. In the past, I didn’t question as much because it could take weeks to get a source through inter library loans, and cost time, effort and money for uncertain results.

Even in daily life, the ease of being able to google anything that pops into my head is wondrous. I was a nerdy kid, who would walk to the library, look up the card index, navigate the Dewey decimal system to try and figure stuff out. But I’d never have the time for that as an adult. I use to dream of living in a library, and when dh proposed to me, he had converted a room in his house into a library. I could manage very well without the internet but I’d miss the speedy access to information.

YorkshireGoldDrinker · 19/11/2025 15:01

Many, many things, and internet scammers getting trolled and scammed back.

HelpMeGetThrough · 19/11/2025 15:03

I’d miss having a job. It’s impossible to do mine without the internet.

DinoLil · 19/11/2025 15:15

I had to stay in a holiday home recently, no WiFi or Internet. What I missed most was Alexa. No lights, no news, no random stuff, no shopping list, no weather forecast. If she was real, I would have hugged her and never let go when I got back.

Thundertoast · 19/11/2025 15:22

Sensible answer:
Would miss having a job, as mine doesn't exist without the Internet
I love online banking and being able to track my spending I dont understand why people make such a massive fuss about it to be honest

Silly answer:
I am a person who wakes up with 1000 questions every single day and loves finding out answers and going down rabbit holes, id wither away and drive everyone mad in the process

StruggleFlourish · 20/11/2025 18:50

What an interesting question you pose.
I can tell you, when the internet goes out for a few hours, what I miss most immediately...

Id miss being able to send instant messages to my family who lives at the other side of town, as this is our main form of communication.

I'd miss being able to check the weather (if the internet outage was weather related)... For instance a winter storm

And up until very recently where a 100% of my customer facing business was conducted on an online retail platform, I'd miss being able to stay in contact with my customers and get any work done. Offline, I can do physical work at home just fine without the internet however, while I am doing the manual labor for hours and hours (and days and days) on end, I very much do enjoy putting on Netflix and listening (not watching, I can't cuz I'm working) to favorite programs that I have honestly seen or I should say heard, dozens of times already. But that's the reason why I put them on. Because if it was something new, something that I wanted to watch, then I'd be looking over at it, and not looking at what I'm doing, which requires visual attention to detail... I do have DVDs that I could pop on, I could put on the radio, but I would miss the programs that I can stream

And if the internet really was gone forever, I think I would miss the ease of communication with certain aspects of society.
By that I mean if I'm part of a group, and that group wants to have a get together, you don't have to have the leader phone every single person to tell them about an upcoming get together, we can just send out an email.

For my day today stuff I'm very happy to do online banking, most of my bills are pre-authorized payment, but it is nice to be able to log in to your bank account and make sure that everything is up to snuff, pay off a bill if you need to that's not taking out automatically, it means I don't have to get in the car and drive to the other end of town during business hours and stand in line and wait for a teller to do this exact same thing I can do it from home whenever.

I used to really enjoy online shopping, admittedly I haven't been doing very much of it the last few years, I loved the fact that you could literally shop the world. But if there was something quite niche that I was looking for, I didn't have to spend hours and hours driving to the most obscure shops and poking in every little corner trying to hope that maybe possibly I'd find what I'm looking for. Online, you can be in the bathtub, you can be waiting for the lasagna to bake, you can be woken up early by raccoons mating beneath your window and then you can't get back to sleep so you can go online and do a little bit of online browsing or shopping...

I won't miss spam, although I have to admit I don't enjoy junk mail that's delivered to my physical mailbox either, and I wouldn't like how there would probably be more phone calls. I really hate phone calls.

I would also really miss YouTube, not that I consume much of it but I find it to be a fantastic tool if there's something I don't know how to do, more than likely somebody has posted a video which might be exactly what I'm looking for. So if there's something wrong with my car, not something major, but something like, oh shoot, how do I reset the computer after an oil change so the car realizes that I just gotten an oil change and it's not saying that it needs an oil change? If I don't know how to do that, and I can't find the manual or I can't quite understand the process, a lot of times a YouTube video is exactly what I need.
Some are way too much talking, or not enough information, or poorly presented but so many of them aren't.

I would miss being able to store my photos and videos in the cloud, yes I store photos videos and other such files on my hard drive I also use an external hard drive, I also use thumb drive backups, and yeah I still even burn data to a DVD, and if I really like the photograph then I will get a physical print out of it to put in a frame but, 99.9% of what I video or photograph ends up stored online and I love the fact that as long as you have Wi-Fi and access to your account you can pull up those photos and videos whenever you need them. (Which admittedly, most of us in the real world don't really need to pull up photos and videos of our kids or our cats doing something but we do anyway.)

From a medical point of view, the internet is great for relaying test results quickly. Like when my pets go to the vets and they get a blood test, the next day my vet can email me the results. So I don't have to make another appointment to go in, he doesn't have to phone me, I appreciate that.

There's probably a number of other things that I personally would miss if the internet disappeared forever tomorrow, but those are just off the top of my head. There's an awful lot of things that are bad and that have absolutely led to a degradation of our society that are completely internet related, the short attention spans, the obsessive need to create content leading people to do stupid or harmful or dangerous things just to gain views, the inability of being able to engage in normal social interactions... And of course, there's all the things that can lead down dark paths such as cyberbullying, pornography involving those who are not fully consenting, and the rise of absolutely whacked out groups of people who normally would never have the confidence to be so racist or misogynistic or extremist because in real life you have to find a whole lot of people to get together to support your ideas before you'll take any type of horrendous /violent action, but on the internet, you can cloak yourself in anonymity and also feel that you're part of a community and that there's more people out there who feel the same way that you do therefore you must be justified in these extremely antisocial thoughts...
So those are things that I wouldn't miss. In a lot of ways, the world prior to let's just say 1990 (just to throw a number out there) was a lot simpler, was a lot friendlier, was a bit larger, and a bit more mysterious. You had to be able to know how to read a map, you had to know how to follow instructions, you had to talk to people around you... It was just a different world before the internet had the grip that it has on most of society today.

And here we are, on an internet hosted chat group, most of us will never know who each other are or where we are in the world or what we look like or how old we are or anything else, and here we are all talking to each other and having this lovely discussion. So, that's an interesting thing about the Internet isn't it. It's great to be able to easily communicate, if you use the tool for good.

herbalteabag · 20/11/2025 18:53

Being able to instantly look things up and get information easily, particularly things that I couldn't find out with a phone call, like a random fact that interests me. Also, doing Wordle!

herbalteabag · 20/11/2025 18:54

I would get used to not having any social media or WhatsApp, as long as I could still text, so none of that would really bother me.

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