The amount of high-speed bandwidth we pay for each month gets used up by around the 15th these days. It’s due to 4 people being online pretty much all their waking hours. One child with a mobile glued to her hand, texting and skyping and instagramming and whatever else she’s doing. Two children listening to Spotify online, searching for music, watching YouTube videos. One husband watching television replays, news, and me…on the computer, checking Facebook, etc. We all check email. We all surf the web. We all rent movies on the Apple TV. It eats up our reservoir and leaves us with a
very
slow
connection.
We could, of course, pay more, but it’s a LOT more, so we just resign ourselves to living as if we were on dial-up for the last half of every month.
It means, among other things, that I’m NOT online as much as I might be in the first 15 days…I don’t watch videos or check my friends list, or read the blog entries of people whose writing I love, or click on links that I know will take ages to download. It’s frustrating, but it’s how we live now. It used be just me, monopolizing the ether of the cyberspace. I could spend hours reading blogs, commenting, starting conversations, browsing art sites, …not now.
When you run out of Internet, you have to find other ways to amuse yourself than the ones that have become de facto. You read books. You watch DVDs. You play games or clean house or maybe you nap. Sometimes you might let yourself wish for the good old days when the kids were small and only played PC games that didn’t require online access or 7 kronor receipts from iTunes. And sometimes you might catch yourself looking forward to the days when you’ll have that high-speed bandwidth all to yourself again…but only for a second because the payoff isn’t really worth it if even it’s expected and how the world works and then all you’ll be able to think about for ages afterwards is how lonely the house will be when there aren’t four people in it spending all their time using up the Internet together.