It’s always a little sad when you’re sitting in a well-furnished house in a nice neighborhood in suburban Baltimore with a latte in one hand and a cracker slathered in expensive cheese in the other, and yet you’re comparing your experience to living in a third world country. This was precisely my moment of depressing entitlement on Wednesday afternoon. The cause of my grievance? Unreliable Wi-Fi. At some point down the line the first world decided Wi-Fi was an inalienable human right, and that we are entitled to access to the internet at all times. It wasn’t even that there was no internet – no, the problem was just that internet access was sporadic, shutting on and off every couple of hours or so. Every couple of hours! Do you know how lucky we are to have a power grid – let alone an internet grid – that doesn’t shut off every five minutes? Most people in the world don’t even have reliable access to power and clean water, and yet here I was, about to bite into a piece of cheese whose name I couldn’t even pronounce, and whining because I had to turn the wireless modem off and on again. I’m more than a little ashamed.

To be fair to me, I did have work to do – I had to turn in a freelance writing assignment via email – but it wasn’t like I was utterly without access to the internet. There was a desktop plugged into a landline right five feet away, so I just loaded my work onto a flash drive and, lamenting the extra three minutes it took, sent it off.

I wonder at what point Wi-Fi became a prerequisite for productivity. I can’t imagine doing my homework without my laptop, and to me my laptop means internet – web browsers, email, etc. The thought of being without Wi-Fi when I was trying to work legitimately scared me. There’s a reason for this. Many of our applications have come to rely on constant internet connection, whether for updates, for retrieving information, or even for basic use. Without the internet laptops are no longer as powerful. They’re just fragmented devices that can do a few things like word processing and photo editing. At a certain point the cost of the machine and the power to run it was no longer enough. We began having to build in the cost of internet service, the cost of constant connection to a network. The price, much more than the monetary cost, is that we have become dependent on Wi-Fi and the internet in general. This is not a bad thing, per se, as internet connections are pretty much a given in most parts of the developed world, but I wonder if we’re setting ourselves up for a situation where our dependence on the internet – I’m thinking about things like online banking – could fall prey to cracks in the system, and we could end up in a situation where all the information stored in the cloud (read: giant server farms in California) is either lost or rendered inaccessible. Do we, a connected generation, have the resiliency to bounce back if we suddenly lose our connection?

-epn