> How do people feel when they lose Internet access?
Buried at the end of the article about Facebook amplifying racism that I just posted is a fascinating bit of journalism talking to people in an affluent Berlin suburb that lost Internet access:
Asked how life changed, Stefania Simonutti went bug-eyed and waved her arms as if screaming.“The world got smaller, a lot changed,” said Ms. Simonutti, who runs a local ice cream shop with her husband and older son. She lost touch with family in Italy, she said, but was most distressed by losing access to news, for which she trusts only social media, chiefly Facebook.
“Many people lie and fake things in the newspapers,” she said, referring darkly to matters of war and disease. “But with the internet, I can decide for myself what to believe and what not.”
Esperanza Muñoz, a cheery, freckled woman who moved here from Colombia in the 1980s, found the outage relaxing. She socialized more with neighbors and followed the news less.
“Social media, it’s an illusion,” she said.
Her daughter, a medical student named Laura Selke, said global events seemed less stressful during the outage.
“When news spreads on Facebook, it’s made more provocative,” she said.
She hadn’t realized how much anxiety social media caused her until she went for a few days without it.
“You really do notice,” she said. “It really was very comfortable, very nice.”
Ms. Muñoz added that Facebook communities in her native Colombia seemed even more prone to outrage and filter bubbles.
“It really was as if there was only one opinion,” she said, describing her Facebook feed during recent Colombian elections. “We’re only informed in one direction, and that’s really not good.”
Less stress, a clearer mind, awareness of more opinion. The article frames this all around loss of access to Facebook, but it happens with general loss of internet access too. As a non-Facebook user, I felt exactly the same when I spent a week without a smartphone.