GOING DARK

I was in the lift the other morning when I overheard two people from another business talking. The conversation went something like this: “Morning mate, apparently the internet is down until about 9.30am” to which the second guy in a mild state of panic asked “what are we going to do?” to which the first guy replied “we could talk about our feelings!”. This got me thinking: how would we cope if the world went dark for a day or even just a couple of hours? I know a number of people who believe they wouldn’t be able to cope, but what would you do? For many, it is now virtually impossible to imagine life without the internet.

Do we rely on the internet too much? We are so used to having an ‘always on’ internet connection (and life!) that even relatively short disruptions would have an effect.

We’ve all experienced down time and the frustration of staring at the Error 404 page, then made ourselves a coffee while we wait for the tech team to call us back to then only ask if we’ve tried shutting down our computer and starting it up again! But I believe that if we were forced to turn off our computers for a few hours a month and filled that time with real actionable tasks we may surprise ourselves and increase our overall productivity.

Anyway back to the lift! As I work on the top floor (and the lift is extremely slow), I’ve been entertaining myself between floors over the last couple of days. I asked a few people how they would feel if they had no internet for the day and here’s what they said.

“We’d just have to start talking to each other more, like they used to do in the old days”.

“We have a no internet policy every other Friday morning and I love it. We use this time to talk to other parts of the business outside of our direct team”.

“It would be a great way to start the working day, a morning chat about what we we wanted to get out of the day. Perhaps I’d get more done!”.

“It would be interesting to do it for a day and see what work we could still get done.”

“What no Google?!”

“I’d have to talk to my boss!”.

“I don’t have the time not to have the internet”.

“I’d be bored by lunchtime”.

What Would Your World Without Internet Look Like?

Whilst it may seem novel to do for a day, especially given the movement around mindfulness in the workplace and making genuine connections with colleagues – but what if there was a serious outage that lasted for a week? Longer outages would start to have an effect on our business operations, so many organisations have business continuity plans prepared in the event of a significant period of down time.

As a recruiter, I use the internet more than ever and it’s become an integral part of my everyday life. Obviously there are some parts to my job that I could do without the internet, but I’d have no access to the global talent I currently work with and a narrower perspective on the wider market.

So without internet we would have to adapt! Could businesses survive if we all went back to sending letters instead of email and talking to people rather than using Slack or Asana.

There has been much discussion that the digital age has had a negative impact to many workers. Rather than use the internet to offer their employees more flexibility, some employers use it to exploit them, demanding more work or longer hours than often run into the weekend. Effectively, the internet has helped to blur the lines between work and home life and has dramatically changed our cultural conception of patience. Without it, we simply wouldn’t expect instant gratification as often as we do.

Life Without Internet It’s true to say that almost all businesses nowadays have some relationship with the internet whether it’s a simple business listing or an online store. What implications would be put upon businesses across the world with the loss of the internet? It’s simple to say that the impact on businesses that utilise the internet would be massive and the make or break factor would be if they could actually survive without it.

But there could be some advantages created: as consumers we’d probably start buying locally, enriching our local towns and shops and we’d look for local services and sustain local economies by trading within our immediate areas.

Who Would Survive? Many older businesses just simply embraced the internet and didn’t solely found their existence around it, so we’d find a good number of businesses still in a position to trade. Those businesses that simply use the internet as an advertising medium or virtual shop would not see such a deep impact as others. As long as they had diversity and a strong customer base they’d adapt in whatever ways necessary to keep trading.

How much does your business rely on the internet? Could you work a day without it?

If the world was to lose the internet for a day or even just a couple of hours what we’d all need to remember is not to panic, we did pretty well without it for a long long time! The probability of us experiencing a total loss of the internet is very unlikely, but either way I’m quite sure we’d adapt and persevere as we have done for thousands of years and who knows what the next solution to arrive will be – perhaps there is a post-internet