It's quite amazing, really, how much our society depends on a pairing of tiny copper wires. The thin strand that separates our society from savagery. The phone line, the electricity, even the piping under the building, but most of all, the internet. If any of these things are severed, a home becomes nothing but a primitive shell in the modern age.
It used to be that having an internet line to your house was a privilege and a luxury, now it is simply assumed, by both the educational faculty of society and the public at large. One is required to have an email, one is required to have connectivity, and most of all, one is expected to be able to google or wiki away the answers to all of life's little mysteries.
Thus is the great tragedy of the modern age, in terms of social interaction. All arguments are laid mute by wikipedia, all effort in communication dulled by email, and all pondering answered by the all knowing google. There is no mystery one can be expected not to solve on ones own. Everyone can safely assume that each other person has the same information about the same insipid topic.
However, this is not the real tragedy of the internet generation, for what knowledge could be said to be for ill. The real flaw is that a human being without a presence on the web is reduced, somehow. As a person without a high school education years ago, or a person without a Y chromosome years before.
It has become a norm, and one which seems quite acceptable to us all, that is, until we lose the norm itself. A challenge I place upon all human beings: go one week without consulting the web or your internet contacts. Go just one week without instant messengers or downloading media. See then how feral you feel, and know that once all is said and done, you'll not have to feel that way very often in the rest of your life.
Our society values the internet too much to let it be stifled by such trivial things as hardware and connectivity. Soon it will be indestructible, and then the populous will cry out in joy, each leeching their own version of Mork and Mindy whilst sipping their Joltang cola.
I suppose good things come to those who wait.
