{"id":4018,"date":"2013-09-27T10:36:08","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T08:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/?p=4018"},"modified":"2023-06-01T15:25:49","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T13:25:49","slug":"is-the-internet-a-journey-or-a-destination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/general\/is-the-internet-a-journey-or-a-destination\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Internet a journey or a destination?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emerson struggled with these kind of issues a couple of hundred years ago. I know because I googled it. If he could have hauled himself out of his confused 19th<\/sup> century philosopher mode and got a job as a clever normal modern bloke at Web Africa, I\u2019m quite certain he would have worked through all that meaning of life stuff and solved it with an unequivocal formula \u2018life = the internet\u2019, updated all of his website entries accordingly, and moved on to worrying about his data costs.<\/p>\n

We could have used his voice recording on our Customer Care number, you know, that irritating bit before you get to speak to a real person: \u201cyou might currently be experiencing slow ADSL speeds but enjoy it because the internet is a journey, not a destination\u201d. No, I do not mean that.<\/p>\n

I mean this<\/a>. Does anyone remember this sound?  It\u2019s awful isn\u2019t it, but it was a big part of our Internet lives not very long ago.  It might well now be used in shock therapy treatment to test the veracity of amnesiacs’ claims (“So you can\u2019t remember anything as far back as 2007, are you sure?\u201d, Zap!),  because in 2007, that\u2019s the noise which most of us were hearing when we dared to go online. That\u2019s less than seven years ago. I\u2019ve had my car for seven years and it still works.<\/p>\n

They used to explain it to us as a handshake and we all fell for the implied reassurance of the word but it was no such thing. The variance and multitude of tones immediately cries out \u201cI\u2019m shooting in the dark here, I\u2019m random and I\u2019m guessing who you are and where you are\u201d; the incessant background hissing invokes a pre-remote TV tuning kind of panic  \u201cwherever you are, you\u2019re a long, long way away, will I ever find you and you\u2019re scaring me\u201d; and the monotone finale to the 30-second head-splitting cacophony was invented purely to distract us to the point that we felt so blessed to witness an ET connection 1 being fleeced per minute from the first second for enjoying it from that point on.<\/p>\n

Not that we could enjoy it because we spent our time watching bits of pages being born in remote areas of our screens before giving up because it cost too much. It was quicker to draw a homepage than it was to download it, and required considerably less skill and patience.<\/p>\n

So where are we now? Yes, we are a bit behind many countries in terms of speed and cost (read my blog about why Internet in South Africa is so slow<\/a>) but we can pretty much run our lives staring at a screen. We couldn\u2019t do that seven years ago.<\/p>\n

In 2013, you can do a gazillion times more in a much shorter time and pretty much run your life, and unless you\u2019re downloading the entire internet, you can do what you like for an all-in fixed monthly cost of around R250<\/a> if you\u2019re not in too much of a rush.<\/p>\n

So the internet isn’t a journey any more, it\u2019s a destination?<\/strong> You can do pretty much everything on it, you can go anywhere, learn anything, buy anything, meet anyone, watch anything, play anything, read anything. I can sit all day clicking at screens, but it\u2019s not terribly fulfilling and the fact is my fat arse is more glued to its seat than it was a year ago. Give it another year and the two will be inseparable.<\/p>\n

I need to remember the joys of \u2018getting out there\u2019, spending a day in the sun with the noisy crowd at Newlands watching the Australians get thrashed. There\u2019s only so much of that experience which can be streamed or downloaded. They don\u2019t do smell, taste and touch too well online yet. And they definitely don\u2019t do that weird “humans together” social need. Maybe it\u2019s only a matter of time but for now I will book my tickets online, get in the car and go to the game. And to the shops. And to my friends\u2019 places. And. And.<\/p>\n

So for me, the Internet, whether it’s life or not, will remain a journey not a destination.<\/p>\n

Our beautiful Internet. Early days.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emerson struggled with these kind of issues a couple of hundred years ago. I know because I googled it. If he could have hauled himself out of his confused 19th century philosopher mode and got a job as a clever normal modern bloke at Web Africa, I\u2019m quite certain he would have worked through all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":4022,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/INTERNET-AFRICA-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdAWxt-12O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13210,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018\/revisions\/13210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.webafrica.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}