Breaking ties with the Internet

Well, it done happened again – we broke the Internet. Before we got done griping about the heat wave, a thunder-boomer hit our place on July 3. We were ecstatic to get an inch or so of badly needed rain – we did not lose electricity – but we lost our Internet.

We do not need to have Internet. I get up around six o’clock: while Mr. Coffee perks, I kill time online: check the weather, email, news headlines, until my wife wakes up. I bring her coffee in bed and we discuss philosophical issues until we get the day in gear.

But: when the Internet dies, what do you do? I wonder about the only sports team I care about, the San Francisco Giants. Did they win? Did they lose? In pre-Internet times, the late night West Coast scores of the Giants, Dodgers, et al., would appear in the newspaper two days later. With Internet, I can monitor games, or, for a fee, I could watch them live (I don’t).

What did Trump do overnight? I missed it! Did he disavow his love affair with Russia or North Korea? Did he recover his sanity? With Trump, we need up-to-the-minute information. But if I have no Internet, how can I read about his latest escapades?

Hey – wait a minute – maybe I do not want to read about the latest yuck vomited from our president’s mouth or Twitter account. Maybe I do not want reportage of alternative facts and fake news from the squalid swamp he promised to drain. A little less tension, thank you.

But I did want to know if we might be blessed with more rain. I did have a couple of folks to respond to via email. Being the 4th of July holiday, where might I go for Wi-Fi? I parked in front of our daughter’s house, and magically, the connectivity symbol flashed. I checked the weather, wrote those necessary emails, and drove off. Ten minutes online, and that was it for the day.

I missed it later. I planned to fry catfish and hushpuppies for supper, so I pulled out Joy of Cooking and Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen for recipe advice – imagine that – using a cookbook instead of online recipes! I was blissfully ignorant of the day’s news. And I survived.

We do not own smartphones. Since we are normally able to use Internet at home, and prior to retirement at our workplaces, we did not consider it worth the expense to carry a pocket-sized computer around all day. When we walk down the street and have to alert pedestrians looking down at their screens to avoid bumping into us, when we see a folks at a restaurant table ignoring each other while texting, we know we made the right decision.

Our car is not equipped with GPS, so when we took a road trip last month, we had to rely on the old standbys—a road map and the odometer. We made a couple wrong turns here and there, but that was part of the adventure. And Google maps are frequently off kilter anyhow.

I am not a Luddite opposed to digital technology. I retired from 26 years as a schoolteacher. In the early years, I sponsored a student computer club and wrote a grant for a computer lab. For the past 17 years, my classrooms were computer labs, where my students did research, wrote papers, prepared presentations, and did creative experiments with digital art, photography, video, and music. But the human factor was always paramount.

The human factor nowadays is the holster that carries the device, the device that takes our self-absorbed selfies, brings us to our predetermined “fact” and opinion sites, reminds us what our mutually congratulatory “friends” are doing, tells us which products to buy, and robs us of our privacy.

Once in awhile, limit yourself to 10 minutes online. It will do you a world of good.

Kirk Ashworth