For youthworkers - possibly useful

Life without 'essential' tech?!

A very random contemplation (I think aided by the epic fail of a support site recently) what would life be like without Facebook usage? There are not over 300 million (300'000'000) users (apparently) with most people conducting their lives on social networking sites we expect - the phrase "it's not true if it's not on Facebook" has become more & more prevalent & to some extent true.

In fact when I got engaged to Maddie - we conducted a little social experiment - let's just change our 'relationship status' to engaged & see what happens. The results were both scary & hilarious - it took less that 5 minutes for the first phone call! All this with a very slight change in 2 profiles.

But it did get me thinking - what would happen if there was an epic national power outage? Or if the Internet (which was not initially envisioned for, or designed to do) simply stopped working?

The amount of business, communications, news, media, searches etc. that are done on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis is epic...& growing daily! If that stopped it would be catastrophic fail worldwide.

The concept of the failing of those services is now almost too terrible to comprehend - it would almost be termed as science-fiction - a world without the internet! The same I would postulate would be true if there were no mobile phones - can anyone really remember a time before mobiles?

People born in the 90's almost certainly can't - when I was at school (a considerable time ago!) it was first pagers (ferociously expensive to use & now only used in hospitals & restaurants) then mobile phones properly kicked off when I was just finishing school in the mid-to-late-90's. I got my first when I was 18 & now struggle if I forget to bing my phone for any reason. The techology we now almost take for granted has come on leaps and bounds - you can call, sms, mms, email, take digital picture, web browse, listen to mp3's, and do a host of things with apps. There are multiple connection methods & they even take standard headphones, rather than original (i.e. terrible) sets supplied. the number of phones is always rising - there are always new models with new features - driving the technology forward & creating an easily disposable tool - all from an original concept by Marty Cooper.

I have no answers, just more questions - it's a 'what if' scenario - picture if you will, a world free from technology...


...We continue