The Ubiquitous Internet

Looking around my living room right now I see 3 News on the television, yet all four of us in the room have laptops sitting on our knees - also browsing through other information over the internet at the same time. The thing is though, that none of us think twice about it! This is just another example of the internet being ever-present and always accessible in our lives.

Back when people first began to move from dial-up to broadband/wireless internet one of the major talking points was that "wow, you can have the internet on all day and it won't hold up the phoneline!". A few years later and this is something that we simply take for granted, yes the internet is on all day but nobody ever seems to talk about it as a point of interest. Just like electricity, it is not until it stops working that we realise how much we were using and relying on it; at our flat the wireless router sits under the desk in my bedroom, and if I accidently kick the power cord out of the wall it takes no more than a few minutes for somebody to be knocking on my door saying "what's happened to the internet?!?".

The same can be said for mobile phones, as when the telephone was first invented it was something that was seen as a novelty, yet now the majority of us keep our mobiles at our sides 24/7. We use them to arrange our daily activities and our social lives at a more convienient pace, however most people do not regularly think about just how much they are using them. Despite this, the majority of us would turn around and go back home if we realised we had forgotten our mobile! I personally feel somehow cut off from the world if my phone dies when I am out in public.

I feel slightly uneasy about saying it, but access to a mobile phone and to the internet are things that I guess I now expect in my life. However, this looks like it is becoming an increasingly common view in society.

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