We are scarily reliant on these connections, on connectivity.
The other day my car and my phone stopped connecting and it is just SO convenient to have my map on the little screen in my car. It still annoys me. Losing that connection. I’m not gonna say I am dependent on social media because it’s kind of more than social media. For instance I don’t see my blog as social media. I see my blog as an essential means of communication with a specific group of people.
And yes it is essential. There are very few people who have similar ideas to me down here in central Illinois. Then the last two mornings the app that I write my blog in stopped loading pictures. I write in the WordPress app Jetpack so that I can write to you off-line, because the Internet here is only occasionally on, and when it is on, it’s very weak. Rural America! So I use the app on the phone and my data to write my early morning post from my bed. With all the windows open and no lights on. But the last two mornings that system has not worked. Horrors!!
I had to delete and reload the app with all the associated Password denial. All better now but my confidence is knocked. And I am late publishing.
And then AT&T was down the other day. Then my mother-in-law‘s entire town had no Internet two days ago. Then a social media giant was down for part of the day yesterday. Three serious hits within a week. This is unsettling?
How are you and I going to make sure we stay in touch.
You and I also have TKG Take 10. And the Sunday morning newsletter. That is a totally separate platform which is a little comforting. But once again, these are dependent on an Internet connection.
This does worry me. Our dependence on an internet connection. Though I do concede that it is not natural to be in touch with hundreds of individuals every day. But I would miss this so much. I would miss you.
No one writes letters anymore. I know I’ve said this before, but we should try to write more letters. But I am hopeless too. Mainly because I can write a letter to New Zealand, to my people in New Zealand, from here, the USA, but it takes weeks for the letter to get there. Weeks! We would already have had three telephone calls by the time my letter arrives.
What do you think?
Here is another photo from the night of the tractors.
This is my favorite kind of shot. An image that tells a story. A shot you have to look into.
Have a beaut day!
Take care and Talk soon!
Celi
Dear Tenners (have you joined The Tenners yet?) we have a great TKG Take Ten this evening – the early morning bird chorus is growing! And for those of you who are unable to upgrade – don’t worry. (The Sunday newsletter will always be free). AND When I take off for the mountains of British Columbia in Canada in a couple of weeks we will have another FREE TKG Take Ten week. I don’t want you missing out!
The Kitchen's Garden 
39 responses to “Our scary reliance on Internet Connections”
What a nightmare! I feel that your daily blog posts are a letter to us all.
FreeBee seems to be best friends with the chickens today.
I feel that too. Free form letter writing!!
I’m not sure how we let ourselves become so depended either, and I’m really glad I still have my landline.
We don’t have a landline anymore – it was unreliable too. And the only ones who ever called on the landline were spam calls, marketing calls etc. In the end I pulled the cord out because I was heartily sick of running in from the garden to a sales call. My mother in laws landline is attached to her internet somehow so when the internet was down she had no phone which I thought was unsettling.
Where we are in Vermont, the cells are the ones that are often unreliable!
I am thinking about the internet quite a bit lately. I have been able to get help with the costs from a federal program that will likely end in the next few months. It gives me a substantial savings. The cost of just internet is ridiculous here but how do I go without it? And of course there is only 1 provider, a monopoly and no choice. I am already working on planning what I will have to give up to be able to shift money around… Sadly I also live in a dead zone so phone coverage is spotty at best even with data on. We have truly been made to be totally dependent on technology haven’t we?
In nicer thoughts I love seeing Ton out and about doing his inspection of the fields and animals. FreeBee made me laugh- sitting in that pile of straw! Looks like a happy pig to me 🙂
How much would your internet cost without the subsidy? Just wondering. Everything sits at around 100 a month here.
The rates just went up again in January so without the $30 subsidy and a $10 loyalty award it would be about $86/month I think. I cannot imagine what people pay who have TV and all the other bells and whistles that come along with…
I agree. I would never spend money on cable or tv. All I get is internet too – such as it is.
We have some friends who live in the outskirts of a very rural little town. They did a lot of driving and didn’t want to be dependent on the car’s navigation. He purchased a number of paper maps and learned each town, one by one, and familarized himself by doing day drives to learn each town like the back if his hand. He reduced their dependence on electronics in that way and it even sharpened his memory. He still kept the maps in their car as backup. 😊
I love paper maps too – in fact my Dad wallpapered the walls of our toilet with paper maps when we were kids so we did not waste the time just sitting! I have an old map from when Route 66 was still a major highway – though it did not last long!
That’s such a great idea! Repurposing old maps for wallpaper is brilliant. How creative your dad was back then! Come to think of it, years ago, a dear family friend had a little guest bathroom, it was tiny! They wallpapered the walls with vintage newspapers. It was so fun reading some of the ads, boy were things innexpensive back in the day! So glad you love paper maps too, they’re useful in a multitude of ways. 😊🗺🧭
I love letter writing too! But yes, not practical for reaching hundreds of people (costly!) at speed.
Though I was surprised at the speed at which a letter can reach me here in the UK from the US – the record I think was 5 days (a postcard from a friend in New York). And about a week for letters from another friend in Pittsburgh. But maybe it depends where in the US the letters are sent.
Funny story: I sent postcards from Greece to the UK last summer and each one took at least 2 months to arrive!
I hope your internet improves. Here in the UK there’s been a real push towards upgrading to fast fibre optic broadband especially in rural areas. Small businesses depend on it. The logistics must be harder due to the scale of the US but there must be a way, surely, for the big companies to do it. I’m sure they have the money!
Maybe one day that will reach us. My mother in law has fibre optic internet in her small rural town. I often do my up loading of videos in there where it is so much faster!
I didn’t realize what you were dealing with there. Connection is important, as is writing about our lives and emotions (therapeutic); we are dependent on each other because most of us have a need for interaction and communication. Not so much with the internet, but I’ve noticed when there’s a power outage how dependent I am on electricity and how my life falls apart if it lasts more than a couple hours.
as you know, we do have reliable Internet here, and as you say, we are now completely reliant on it. The question of letter writing and posting doesn’t arise because our Postal Service is only a couple of days a week I recently received my renewed drivers license and it took 10 days for it to get here from a distance of a few KM. A letter from a friend in Canada took three months to get here so it’s the Internet for me.
So, you only get mail a couple of days a week? That is terrible.
The given reason for the reduced service is that the load of mail to be delivered has reduced considerably since the introduction of the Internet. This is been the case for a couple of years and we are all now used to it. But unfortunately, the art of letter writing is now almost extinct in New Zealand. Added to that post offices are being closed and while we used to have one in the village we now have to drive about 6km to the nearest one. And what of those people who can’t drive?
We have small rural towns here in WA that have lost their post offices totally. They are forced to drive miles, often over an hours drive, to get their mail. I’m sure for them their internet is unreliable just like yours as well. It’s ridiculous.
We will rue the day we let the postal service fall into disarray. And it is true – we can only blame ourselves but the old pony express is gone now.
Added to the postal problems, we also have a situation where checks are no longer accepted for everything or anything and government departments are refusing to take cash for account payment. So the only option for people who don’t have the Internet is to find one of the few and far between post offices where they can pay their bills with cash. Whatever happened to Customer Service? It certainly seems to be non-existent here.
I am in a small town in North central Indiana. We have cable internet but no TV. I too am far more dependent on the internet than I ever wanted to be, but everything is now almost exclusively internet access, so how can you disconnect? My bank is over 20 miles away and my vehicle unreliable. My granddaughter does my grocery shopping when I can’t use the vehicle, bless her, and the store is about a half mile from the house.
Before I moved here the cable company I had changed hands and something got badly fouled up and I was without internet and phone (I had VOIP – voice over internet provider) – also, thankfully a cell phone – for 10 days before the new company got things figured out and fixed. That was a real pain in the butt.
Maybe Star Link would be worth a look, Elon Musk says now it is able to connect just about the whole planet.
And we all trust Elon. Right? I have looked at Star Link and it is horribly expensive. They send you the hardware, charge you from that moment and good luck. No technicians for them out this way. I think in ten years – honestly – we will have no offers we can afford.
I’m at that point already. Considering what a pittance I get from Social Security it’s almost impossible to survive on,
Similar conversations happening here. Our landline + cable internet is A$100 per month plus 2 x mobile phone plans @ $35 per month. We live in a rural village-community 30 km from nearest town, 80km nearest regional city, 500 km from a big city. The internet is how we stay connected with each other/family/friends and local/info, buy groceries, online shop, do banking and other business, social media and entertain ourselves. Free-to-air TV is via satellite but streaming gives us more choice. We’re fortunate to have good daily mail service but couriers don’t come out here.
But we’re getting more outages of late, both electricity and phone/data. We have a landline which should standalone be unaffected but mysteriously of late when the electricity goes out it does too, as well as the mobile coverage… and there were are, back in the old days. Something our local friends & neighbours chat about… we have a good community of various resources & skill sets. It would take some adapting and ingenuity but if the world ever reverts to pretechnology, we’d manage. But as you say our connections further afield would be very affected. My Dad lives over a 4 hour drive from here. Even now a return visit costs about A$200 in fuel. My sister lives interstate. The pandemic gave us a taste of what it would be like, people like you with overseas connections most impacted. The further back I go in our family tree I realise if a person married someone who lived a distance away, they had to contemplate they would rarely or never see some of their original family-community again. I think that’s why those old letters were so treasured.
I cannot go back to pre-hi-tech. I would not last 5 minutes out here. (I just deleted a huge diatribe as to why I cannot stay out here alone – without you all) ( I probably do not need to say the words)
I hear you. Same same ♡
Thanks. New broadband modem installed today with back up sim card which means during power/ landline outages we have some sort of coverage. However, I’d prefer to have the back up of oldy style manual landline. The new version gas battery back up which as we found out is, fallible.
Last year, our town contracted two companies to install fiber optic cables all over town. Each residence could sign up with either, or both, or neither. Some chose to stay with the one cable provider. Some use a dish system. They are all expensive.
Better than dial up I guess!
I have to admit I’d hate to lose the connection. There are so many times I wonder ’how do I?’ and I can usually jump on line and find out, especially since John’s gone and I’ve had to learn new skills. As far as letters; who doesn’t like receiving a written missive. When my middle step daughter was in S. America with Peace Corp for 4 years I sent her a letter every other week. Sometimes it was a real challenge, our life here isn’t terribly exciting but she insisted she treasured every one. When a good friend was moving around the midwest we were regular letter writers. Both these people often said how they enjoyed the written news.
Today’s post has been interesting to read especially when Dale and Sherry posted as both are from my side of the Pond. I live semi-rurally about 120 km from the Sydney CBD but tucked away virtually into a National Park – so communication is important. I only use two landlines, a huge desktop computer setup in my library and am absolutely delighted with my ordinary TV + Foxtel Seniors pay TV services which gives me over 100 stations from all over the world but mostly the UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada et al. As i tend to be ‘into a lot of things’ if I can take a night off study et al I may have over a dozen shows I just ‘need’ to see on at the same time 🙂 ! Delightful! I buy almost everything on line . . . last week was ‘busy ordering-wise ‘ – 6 parcels + 3 food > the latter come on exact time and day ordered , all the other parcels arrived within 4 days of ordering – with one we are still waiting for a ship to be unloaded but I get twice daily messages. Yes, Dale – landlines do go off during outages now – but you can order a special landline phone (I have one next to my bed) which has a small ‘radar’ and keeps on going for over 24 hours without a local electricity service. Basically problems are rare – when my old Samsung malfunctioned I did not bother getting a new one . . .got better things to do with my not-so-good eyesight :) - I !would rather switch on an opera r symphony or wander over too a new art display anywhere in the world than bother being bothered by the phone going all the time – when I decide to talk to the outside world I do so! Oh, the cost - my whole setup cots around $A 135 per month +forty dollars for all the fabulous pay-TV connections . . . the road cycling in the Northern Hemisphere has begun so my huge, huge bedroom TV is on until 2 am regularly . . .well, my way!!! I am not wasting money on petrol or time!!! Private mail – I basically send the ‘special’ letters that way – for birthdays, deaths et al. Here it is still daily delivery . . . to rest of Australia I try leave 3-4 working days. . . overseas perchance 7-10 . . .
You are way ahead of us Eha.
frustrating, isn’t it? my posts are struggling to post the picture portion on my Facebook page, which I’ve easily done for years. p.s. I am still a hand written letter person
I know everyone hates Elan Musk (we do as well) but Star Link has made a tremendous difference to us. Comcast wanted to charge us $30,000 to come up the street to our house. My husband works as a consultant and would not be able to work from home without dependable internet. During the pandemic we would have been completely cut off. Now AT&T wants to shut off rural land lines. I understand the anger and frustration in rural America, we seem to be forgotten. We discontinued our land line because it is still dependent on microwave (cell) lines going over the hills. During a recent crisis the land lines were the first to go down, texting was the last.
Yes. We looked at that too. But frankly I cannot afford it. Just can’t afford it. We have this internet from a local company that is pretty pathetic but affordable. No TV. No landlines. Just the cellphones.
We gave up our landlines years ago. When the ‘big fire’ happened, the land lines were the first to go. It seems that the landlines use the cell phone microwave towers to get across the hills. Texting was the the last communication line that worked as PG&E shut off the power.
No matter how complicated things get, your thoughts and photos are a bright light in my day. Many thanks & hugs to you, the farmy and the fellowship here!❤️
The fellowship of the Farmy is a great group of people. We are blessed.