Out Of Touch

For four days, over the weekend, I found myself completely detached from The Internet.

And for four days, my life had to completely change.

And no, I wasn't completely detached from society. For one thing, I still had a mobile phone. I had already made my weekend plans, and they came off stunningly. (For example, on Saturday night I went to a party, which spilled on to the street, and ended at 5.30am in next door's lounge room discussing JP Shilo and his band Hungry Ghost with my friend's neighbour. As a result, I can now get exceptionally good pizza, walking distance from my house, at a fraction of the cost.) Little annoyances - not being able to send proofs of the first Coffee Spoon zine, about which more will be revealed later, via e-mail - were solved by taking my laptop computer to the top floor of a city café and abusing its free wireless access.

And then there is the thing where I have 24-hour access to The Internet in my office. This would have solved each and all of my problems if only my office were properly air-conditioned, or if my city had not been involved in breaking the record for the longest heatwave - 16 consecutive days of temperatures above 35-degrees-Celsius - in Australian history.*

But it is amazing how attached I have become to The Internet, how much I use it to determine my identity, and how I feel incomplete, inhuman, without it. Without The Internet, I had to do things differently. I had to watch the news, on television. I had to call people to discuss things, rather than simply blather to them in e-mail and carelessly await their response. I had to resign myself to not being on call as a freelance writer. I couldn't be an expert on every topic at a moment's notice, but had to live with whatever knowledge I have been able to retain from my seven years at university. But most of all, without The Internet I actually felt alone.

Not lonely, per se. But alone. I was in my bedroom, reading a book, and the world was happening without me. I couldn't peruse my friends' social lives, or read French-language discussions of the protests in Tibet, or discover some new band from Albuquerque whose only instrumentation is a musical saw and a marimba. It was just me and Solzhenitsyn, the two of us alone, locked in tense debate, trapped within the walls of my house.

And you know, being contained like that, shut off from society, cordoned away and left to my own devices? It actually felt a little like freedom.


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* As an aside, it is amazing how useless Occupational Health, Safety and Welfare can be. At the beginning of our Record-Breaking-Heatwave, we began to feel, well, a little hot. We called OHS&W to measure our office. Our OHS&W representative, a lovely specimen of humanity, presented us with wonderful new contraption called - now let me get this right - a Thermometer. It was placed against the single vent in our room. The air coming out of the vent was recorded at a lovely, cool 18-degrees. Then, this Thermometer was moved to measure the temperature one metre away from the vent. This time, it was a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here 34-degrees. Sure, the air conditioner can only force cool air a few centimetres into our office, but the air conditioner works, so there's Nothing We Can Do, Sorry.

But no, they did do something. They sent an e-mail telling us to drink more water, and consider whether we could work from home. Or, in my case, simply not bother working at all.