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Can You Live Five Hours Without the Internet? One in Four Americans Can't

TMCnet Feature

September 30, 2014

Can You Live Five Hours Without the Internet? One in Four Americans Can't

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By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

It's not going too far to say that many of us have come to rely on the Internet. Whether it's for information, for entertainment, for gainful employment or for any of a hundred other reasons, we go online when we want, need, or find ourselves even vaguely curious about something. With all these purposes on hand, it's not surprising that losing access to those purposes is a daunting prospect. Indeed, a recent study showed us just how deep Americans are in the Internet, as fully one in four surveyed said that going five hours without the Internet was a prospect too daunting to bear.


The study in question—Tata Communications (News - Alert)' “Connected World II” study, which addressed over 9,400 users throughout the world along with 1,469 Americans—revealed the shocking truth that going without the Internet for very long was a staggering prospect. It wasn't just the United States that was frantic without Internet access; the global average for time to survive without the Internet was only slightly longer than the United States' at 8.9 hours.

The study also revealed that over half of respondents—fully 54 percent—had feelings of “...fear, anger and anxiety” when that connection winked out, and the global figures boosted those feelings to 64 percent of respondents. Moreover, the study found that 10 percent of respondents aged 15 to 45 spend an average of better than 12 hours a day online, yet most of these diehards couldn't identify who owns the Internet, detail where it comes from, or even inform survey takers of just how it worked. Only half of the global survey respondents could identify the networked data centers that really power the Internet, and 82 percent of all respondents couldn't point to sub-sea cables as being the fastest mode of Internet delivery.

The largest majority of users—77 percent of respondents—called the Internet's greatest benefit the ability to connect people globally with impressive speed, a belief that has been the underpinning of a great many Internet enterprises out there. But perhaps most noteworthy was that almost all of the respondents—92 percent—spend at least one hour every day online.

It might seem like the world is horribly addicted to the Internet, but it's worth noting here that “the Internet” covers a whole lot of waterfront. For everything from checking weather forecasts to online auctions to social media, it's there. For playing games, for even going to work, it's there. Going without the Internet for five hours might well mean being unable to work, which is a disturbing prospect to say the least. We as a society have grown used to the Internet's sheer ubiquity. It's all but killed print publications with lower-overhead online equivalents. It's slowly killing television, though television's putting up quite a fight even in the face of cable cutters moving to Netflix. Now, we're seeing the providers of said bandwidth facing such crunches in terms of available traffic that said providers are looking to extract payments from traffic users to get access to certain kinds of traffic, otherwise known as the concept of “net neutrality.”

The world runs on the Internet in ever-increasing quantities, and losing that access is to lose access to a large portion of life. Just how we treat the Internet now will determine how we access same in the future, and may well open up new opportunities or kill off old ones. Only time will tell how this ends up, but we're not likely to kick the Internet habit any time soon.




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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