What would change most in your world if the Internet were taken offline?

The interactions.Everyone would be less stupid because in my country,Romania,99% of population is very very x 10000.. stupid and the main reason is the internet.Because of it,they combine the great ideas from the internet with their stupidness and this combination makes them even worst.

Not much, I don’t let it take over my life.

except for fluther ;)

I would probably be unemployed.

I’d have to make a lot more trips to the library for work research.

I would be significantly hindered in my freelance business. And I’d lose touch with my friends day-to-day.

I’d be using newspapers and phone books again.
I’d start doing things with my kids.
I’d have sex with the wife again.
I’d go out and meet real people.
I’d see the places my money goes when bills are paid.
I’d stop having a pipe dream about working from home.
I’d go outside.
I’d know what a real store looks like.
I’d find out that by dropping the “e” from “email” there’s a whole new way to send things to people.
I’d buy CD’s to hear new music.
I’d learn how to dial my house phone outside my own area code.
I’d stop wondering if NSA sex on Craigslist would really be just that.
I’d learn things too. Things like: Amazon is a rain forest, Yahoo is chocolate milk, and eBay isn’t even a real word.

But what would change most in my world? No more Google.

Forget about your friends in other countries, let alone other continents. You’ll be hearing less and less of them because when are you really going to call them for more than 5 minutes?

Well since I lived several years of my life before the internet was invented, and even some without it since it was, I think I’d survive. I adapt depending on my connection, so for example I don’t download stuff if the connection is slow, and use books and directories if I’m looking for information. If I didn’t have any internet (or at least access to a netcafe) it would be hard to communicate with some of my friends abroad, but I guess I’d just call them and pay a fortune.

I’d stil like to keep my PC if possible, but if I also had to give that one up then I guess I’d spend more time with friends, or read more books or something.

I’d get dumb.

Seriously, the Internet is my source for information, how I keep in touch with friends, quick easy knowledge, and often how I teach myself. Right now I am teaching myself Python to do Project Euler math problems. The Python shell I needed was free to download online, Project Euler is online, and encouragement to do both activities has been found largely online. (RichardHenry pointed me to a GREAT how-to-learn Python book that was available, you guessed it, online.)

The Internet keeps me intellectually stimulated.

I wouldn’t have a job freelancing. If you also include LANs then most of today’s businesses would cease to exist or at least be seriously impaired.

Accckkkkk!
Rather cut off my right arm than give up the Internet!!!!

I would get a lot more work done.

Also I have to rely on snail mail again for business

I’d probably have much more of a life and lose a few lbs. Or I’d just find something to do while being equally as lazy.

I would have to make my own videos of dancing cats and dramatic hamsters.

@Grisson, @PupnTaco, @dynamicduo—I didn’t say there’d be no phone or electricity, just no Internet (and ergo no e-mail). Could your work still be done via fax? (I know my answer would be, “Yes, but god how slow — and how much less efficient!”)

@Jayne, I lurve you. I’d miss my time-gulping games, but I would miss having alternative news sources more. And the research wouldn’t be nearly as easy, unless someone invented an instant book index (for the cover) or a remote book search engine — you scan book spines on the shelf, looking for books that contain your search phrase.

Also, we’d probably get a glut of Evelyn Wood commercials and far fewer .com commercials. Yay! “FreeCreditReportdotCom” jingles would no longer haunt my mind for days!

@Sorceren Oh! In that case I’d invent a way to transfer data using the phone and call it GrissonNet.

I would pay the jacked-up price for books from my campus bookstore.

I would spend a lot more time searching the shelves of Borders, even though it seems like they hardly ever have what I’m looking for.

My musical palate would have had far less opportunity for growth.

I would know less about the electronics and musical equipment that I buy, since I wouldn’t have as much access to professional and user reviews. I would end up paying higher prices for whatever I did end up buying, and it probably wouldn’t be as nice as what I have.

I have a couple of very shy friends for whom the Internet has proved a very good shell-breaking opportunity (at least with their connection to me—I probably wouldn’t have developed those friendships without that initial online connection, even though I was already acquainted with them in person).

It would be harder to figure out if girls were single, and how to impress them. (Okay, this one is theoretical.)

I would never have to worry about inadvertently slipping into lolspeak.

I would probably get more reading done. (Which is something I’m getting better at, anyway.)

You can’t design a fax web site! Web design and web marketing, arguably the wave of the future for businesses and self promotion, would cease to exist. I’m a web designer, thus yes, my job is completely gone. And no, I certainly would not start doing print design, without the internet there’s no way in the world you can effectively and cheaply and quickly pass back mockups and detailed revisions by using a crappy black and white fax machine.

The Internet is much more than just email. What you’re implying by saying no email is no physical connection between any two computers anywhere in the world, no networking, etc. And that affects much more than email – all file sharing is gone, all collaboration is limited to physical interactions, etc. :)

I’d be at the bookstore and library more.

@dynamicduo—No, I quite see that your business would vanish. So might mine.

Hmm… I just flashed on what a wheelwright or a carriage builder must have felt like as cars started becoming more common…

And I just <shudder> remembered proofreading for a linotypography company — which vanished as the Internet gained wide usage — in an airless, silent little room with a dragon at the front desk. Wishing it was 4:20.

Physically going back to work… aghhh!

I could still freelance in my jammies, but my fax/phone bills would skyrocket again!

i can’t decide if my grades would suffer or go up. i’d think they would go down because i’m a horrible researcher. however, with the amount of time i spend on the internet procrastinating (like now), maybe i’d actually study? though i think i could find a good book to read instead of studying, of course
also, i would lose a lot of pictures and i would be super pissed.

@dynamicduo—thinking about your second graf now:

“The Internet is much more than just email. What you’re implying by saying no email is no physical connection between any two computers anywhere in the world, no networking, etc. And that affects much more than email – all file sharing is gone, all collaboration is limited to physical interactions, etc. :)”

I know. And therefore all collaboration between the bad guys, the terrorists, and the uberwatchers too! (Imagine no spam. But don’t forget phone — aside from phone soliciting, I used to get spam by fax!)

I’m wondering now whether any force or power exists large enough to take the Internet away from just J.Q. Public.

I would do some more other staff on PC as i did before i got broadband(which i am still doing now, only less time)

@Sorceren – I enjoy following your thoughts on this issue :) Regarding taking away the internet. So long as it’s not the ISPs or owners of the phone lines or central routing servers which compromise the underlying spine of the internet, I doubt it can ever be taken away or even crippled by a purposeful attack. Well I could see some type of server DDOS aided by a botnet virus hammering down and effectively choking the internet for a few hours before the server custodians would notice and start solving the problem. But even if the internet as we know it ceases to exist, another one would rise from its flame, starting out as a small network of computers, then expanding and connecting these networks via whatever the new means of communication would be.

But, if the ISPs start conspiring with people who do not have the internet’s openness in mind, such as the recording industries in America are planning on doing and like some in Europe are succeeding at doing already, this is when we start going down the slippery slope into the internet becoming crippled compared to what it is now. Once one type of data transmission is monitored or hampered, it’s easy to persuade them to do another type, and then another, until we have some crazy situation like in Australia.

I like your comparison with a carriage builder, however the situations are not exactly the same. There will always be some desire for a carriage, even if it’s in the old-style-world recreation parks or for the rich people’s amusement. Sure, a great deal of them moved out of the trade, but that is simply the price that the advancement of technology carries. I mean, we don’t seem to mourn the loss of horse tamers either. With the destruction of the internet though, nothing is gained, in fact it would be analogous to all of the printing presses being destroyed and the banning of all books in terms of hampering humanity’s progress.

Simply due to the way the internet is set up, I would find it extremely unlikely that it could be ‘taken away’ from Joe Blow. However it’s very likely that the internet we know today will not really be that of the future, until we can tell the ISPs and cable-owners to stop advertising speeds they can’t deliver and to start investing in the next generation of wires with capacity to serve the internet’s needs. This strikes a bit close to me here in Canada because our phone line infrastructure were created with our tax dollars way back when, and now the builder/controller of the lines (Bell Canada) chooses to throttle and mess around with not only their own paying customers but the wholesale internet sold to other companies. The other competitor, Rogers, is no better, having implemented a 60GB limit as well as never achieving their advertised speeds. Data pricing in Canada is atrocious especially on cell phones, and there is NO reason this needs to be other than corporate greed. While p2p represents a lot of the bandwidth being occupied, the next biggest category is simple web browsing thanks to YouTube and streaming video everywhere. The ISPs are trying to block off p2p to free back up the lines, but they’re just going to get clogged again in a few years time. As usual though, big companies prefer to not do work (build the next generation of lines) and take your money instead. And sadly the government is letting these monopolies continue. Go lobbyists. Disgusting.

Travel but decline, but personal relationships would be on the incline. I feel like I rarely talk to my friends on the phone anymore because we talk on gchat and I see what they are doing everyday on Facebook. That is one of the depressing results of the internet. I feel like calling is getting so “old school.”

@dynamicduo — “I like your comparison with a carriage builder, however the situations are not exactly the same. There will always be some desire for a carriage, even if it’s in the old-style-world recreation parks or for the rich people’s amusement. Sure, a great deal of them moved out of the trade, but that is simply the price that the advancement of technology carries. I mean, we don’t seem to mourn the loss of horse tamers either. With the destruction of the internet though, nothing is gained, in fact it would be analogous to all of the printing presses being destroyed and the banning of all books in terms of hampering humanity’s progress.”

Yes, exactly. Some people think that would be best — especially people who don’t like how quickly the Internet can generate a storm of media-interesting protest.

I would actually go outside instead of looking at pictures of outside.

the way i make cash

I would have no job.