And the net goes on, and on, and on…
Howard Wright on humankind’s growing reliance on the Internet. I have just picked up that the website – Internetworldstats.com – has published up-to-date figures on the number of people connected to the net for every country of the world.
The surprising thing is that the UK has continued to grow at around 8 – 10% per year with over 45m people now connected to the Internet (as of September 2009),
The population, historically, was predicted to peak at the 40m mark, however this has been passed and seems set to
continue for the next year at least. With over 73% of the population connected, our dependence in this technology is increasing, and thereby our reliance on the Internet in all aspects of our lives. There has been some rumours in the past 12 months that the Internet is reaching capacity and predicted to fail at some point over the next few years. The impact of this on our lives would be pretty devastating.
We are currently having our house remodelled and we have been living in a hotel for the last 4 weeks – without the Internet. What was surprising is the feeling of loss that you have when you loose connectivity – there is a period of readjustment and going ‘cold turkey’ when I was really stressing out that I couldn’t connect. The ‘pain’ does subside after a while and you realise you can exist without a connection. Bearing in mind that this ‘learned behaviour’ has only taken place in the last 5 or 6 years it is amazing how dependent you can get so soon. It’s not just the ability to connect but it is the feeling of isolation that goes with it.
So back to the original point of the post – the continued growth in connectivity in the UK. The importance of the Internet now for the way we live our lives would suggest that it has now become a utility in its own right and thereby should be regulated as all the other utilities are. Regulation would bring standard levels of service as well as control over how the service is delivered and who to – the need for every household to be provided with a connection – a la the postal service!
Your thoughts?
