As with many people, I travel during Christmas to see my family. I’m currently staying at a family member’s house, typing out a blog post because I still want to write every day. They’re working on decorating and I don’t want to disturb them, but I don’t know the password to their wifi. I’m having to make do by using my phone as a personal hotspot, but the bandwidth is terrible and it takes like 20 seconds to load any webpage. This had made me think of a question: what technology would I miss the most if I lost it? Agriculture might be pretty high up there, but the internet would definitely take top spot. I could probably do without a car or climate controlled rooms for longer than I could do without the internet, it’s just made my life so much easier and more fun. I like to blog, I like to game online, but more deeply I like to keep in touch with all my friends who live far away and work with my collaborators who live in other countries. I like that when I travel I can easily book hotels and find restaurants all before I arrive in a city, and that when I’m home I can find which hotspots are too crowded to go to without wasting my time to first go to them. Even reading has gotten more fun with the internet, Agatha Christie had a habit of dropping random bits of French into her books just because, and if I read those books without the internet I’d have no way of knowing what a character had said, and wondering to myself if it had been an important clue. Now I can just type it into google translate and know “ah, that character was just mocking another one’s accent, cute.” Not to mention that I can start a book on a kindle, lose that kindle, and continue right where I left off on a second kindle. And also not to mention that my local library has an email digest of new books that are often very interesting, and which I’d have never known about if it weren’t so easy for them to tell me about them through email.

Yeah the internet is pretty great, I should ask for the wifi password.