Internet Illness

I wrote this article last week for the Adelaide Uni rag, On Dit, and felt the need to publish it here as well. Sigh.

I have a sickness. It’s not a physical disease, but a mental one. I lose hours of every day because of my condition. You see, I have a wholly unhealthy reliance on the internet.

Okay, so I’m being overly dramatic. Chances are that anyone reading this uses the internet on a regular basis. But does that mean that I’m being silly, or that you’re sick too?

I had this epiphany when my internet connection broke the other day. There were still the icons on my toolbar saying that everything was ready, and my browser opened, but then came the horrible message: “Server not found”.

Now, I was doing an assignment, and naturally this was going to irritate me a bit. But when I started feeling like I deserved chocolate and some comforting words from my family because of it, I decided that things had gone too far. It was a brief disconnection from the world-wide web, not pneumonia!

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that my family seemed to have taken it the same way. “How’s your internet going, Hannah?”, my Mum called from the other room. This caught the attention of my sister, who came running in hopefully, squeaking “Is yours working?!”. Anyone would think we had been marooned by a blizzard and left with no way to contact the rest of the world.

This kind of reliance doesn’t stop with the internet, either. A couple of days ago, I was idly chatting with one of my friends. They made some funny comment about John Howard’s eyebrows, or something equally laughable. Disturbingly, my first thought was to message one of my friends about it. I actually contemplated paying money to pass on a throw away line that, chances are, would lose all meaning once robbed of its context. In no way is this logical.

A friend’s sister took this reliance further still and, a year or two ago now, was diagnosed with ‘texting tendonitis’ – a type of repetitive strain injury contracted from using your thumb to type text messages more frequently than is really a good idea. Really folks, when the need to talk to our friends with this kind of frequency is so great that people risk injury to do so, doesn’t something seem just a little bit wrong?

But back to my tale of woe and wireless internet. A relay of shouted instructions between the room with my laptop and the desktop computer around the corner solved the problem eventually (though we’ve no idea how), and life and assignments went on. But I’m left with the ultimate irony of my embarrassing affliction: my first thought was to post this in my blog.