Internet outage made me reminisce about life before digital dominance | Columnists

It’s hard to imagine going back to a world without internet. Like it or not, we’ve opened the digital Pandora’s box, and there’s no going back.

The April 3 storm that knocked out internet service in swaths of Berkshire County — including at The Eagle and Greylock Federal Credit Union, the latter of which saw reports of customers unable to access their bank accounts — gave us a taste of that simpler time. The online headline for The Eagle’s coverage of the ordeal even proclaims that it had residents “living like the ‘90s.”

In the 1990s, I was very young, and while I don’t remember much of it, I do understand that sentiment of what it means to remember the pre-internet age. Truthfully, for much of my time living in Windsor in the early 2000s, we also lived like we were in the 1990s, at least in terms of the internet. As documented thoroughly in The Eagle, Windsor was on the short end of the “digital divide” that exists in the Berkshires. Windsor was always a few years behind any advances in service seen in more populated areas like Pittsfield.

I moved to Windsor in 2004 with my family, and we had dial-up internet until 2011 when our house got Hughesnet. Hughesnet billed itself as high-speed internet, but it was still miles behind the service I get living in Pittsfield today. It was common for the internet to cut out for hours at a time or to slow down to the point where it would struggle to load things like videos. If you wanted to watch something long on YouTube, for instance, you were best off pausing it and letting it load for a while or just downloading the thing.

Despite how unreliable it was, I never felt like I was lacking anything. When the internet was down, we simply did something else: explore outside, read a book or play a video game (offline, of course). Our family read the print edition of The Berkshire Eagle daily; I sometimes read it cover to cover.

Life without the internet seemed fuller, calmer and, in general, happier. Some of this also has to do with the fact that my reliance on it coincided with my coming of age, where this technology became inextricably linked to my adult life and responsibilities. More of it, however, I think is due to the addictive nature of social media and the price we pay while using apps designed to get us to scroll forever via their algorithms. The only way to be completely at peace, it seems, is to unplug and remove yourself from the endless torrent of content.

While I don’t regret my largely offline upbringing, I did often feel left out as I watched my friends in larger towns or less-remote corners of Windsor get high-speed internet before us. Even when we moved in 2013, it would still be four years until I would get my first smartphone, joining my peers in having the world’s knowledge at my fingertips. In fact, at my fall 2014 orientation at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, I was the only student with a flip phone.

The internet no doubt has made certain fields and processes more efficient. As anyone who was working at The Eagle on April 3 will tell you (myself included), putting together a newspaper offline is no easy task.

But there’s also a point where our online spheres become too much. Not everything online is worth your attention. Not all of it is enriching and challenging. Some of what is published online isn’t even credible. We all need times where we power down and enjoy the people and places before us and give our brains time to rest.

Ironically, my home in Windsor was one of the best places to do that, as it was nestled in the heart of the forest unburdened by the distractions of a city like Pittsfield. I still sometimes miss those simple days before Facebook and Instagram, where my siblings and I would spend entire days doing nothing but look for frogs, chase each other around or take a nap under the sun.

Mitchell Chapman is The Eagle’s night news editor.