Staying connected

In her Feb. 7 column, Kerry Brodie wrote about the benefits of turning off the Internet. But if our recent Wi-Fi failure has taught us anything, disconnecting is not the solution. The problem isn’t the Internet, it’s us users. It’s not that access to Facebook distracts us, but that we go to Facebook to be distracted. When the network went down, people adapted. Instead of the usual Facebook blue and PrincetonFML orange being visible in lecture halls, the Minesweeper gray and Solitaire green covered screens.

Connectivity is powerful, especially when used for good. Services such as Google Docs ensure that I can begin this article on a desktop computer with an Ethernet connection unaffected by recent outages and resume writing on my laptop later. Between sign-in celebrations, Bicker and the start of classes, the flexibility for both me and my editor to access the same document from opposite sides of campus is extremely powerful. Since we have access to the same copy, I can make changes throughout the day, and my editor need not constantly worry about hassling me to send in the latest changes. I could be on the other side of the Atlantic or right in the ‘Prince’ office and still be able to contribute.

Connectivity has also changed how organizing events works. Time and time again, a blank online document gets turned into a multi-page plan within minutes and hours thanks to the ability to remotely view and modify it. It’s becoming quite difficult to keep people updated about a changing plan without these new technologies. Without them, either planning devolves into meeting after meeting, which becomes time-consuming relative to the amount of work done, or work and power gets concentrated too much into the hands of a core set of individuals. The outage removed the option of individuals simultaneously distributing their efforts to their individual specialties in the form of collaborative editing.

The outage showed how necessarily dependent we are on connectivity. It was a spectacular failure, a complete inability to access important information about our first day of classes. However, we live in a world with significant up-time. Even if the network is down 80 hours per year (10 of the recent outages), we would still experience 99 percent up-time. We can get online almost all the time, provided we stay in range of the Orange Bubble’s Wi-Fi.

Some argue that connectivity makes us less productive because of the constant distraction. Like most people, I have on occasion abused the ability to go online during lecture. I’ve written articles, edited spreadsheets and surfed the web when I should have been taking notes. But I far more often use Wikipedia to better understand lecture material, write my notes online and quickly respond to critical emails. In the lectures where I haven’t been allowed the use of my laptop, I paid just as much (or little) attention because I would doodle instead of using the web.

Rather than turning off the Internet, students need to use it more effectively. Far too often an email is received, the sender and title are skimmed for importance and then the message is quickly forgotten. Rather than using filters and labels, inboxes are left as a list of unread emails. Rather than writing emails in short, concise bullet points, too many emails are written in the format of this column. If someone is getting too many emails requiring attention, it’s responsibilities and division of labor which require fixing, not the frequency of checking emails. Email, online word editing and social media are mere tools.

When most of campus was unable get an Internet connection, communication slowed significantly. And rather than making life more relaxing or productive, slow communication resulted in slacking off. Without near-instantaneous and easy communication, last-minute changes cannot be as easily made, research cannot be done, and events are much more difficult to organize. Rather than performing rewarding activities without distraction, everyone had an excuse to be unable to do anything. Rather than gaining time, we lost productivity. In other words, the recent Internet outage has taught me that we need more connectivity, not less.

Christopher Troein is an economics major from Windsor, England. He can be reached at ctroein@princeton.edu.