I am currently in a place without broadband, and it’s painful. Even something as simple as checking e-mail is an agonisingly slow experience.
I can hardly believe that I used to use the internet this way all the time.
The way broadband users “waste” bandwidth is another example of the “economics of abundance” that Chris Anderson has been writing about lately. It’s very instructive for those to using the Internet casually and quickly to remember that 56K dialup still the way many (most, in many places) people experience the Internet — it’s a resource to be switched on temporarily, for specific tasks.
The dialup experience is an Internet without social bookmarking, without VoIP, without casually throwing up a quick blog post. RSS newsreaders have to be switched off because they use a prohibitively large chunck of available bandwidth. It’s a time-consuming one-way channel, not a time-saving two-way resource. It sucks.
I’d rather read my news printed on paper or talked at me from a flickering box than via this apalling medium — worth remembering when in evangelical mode.
Dial-up only eh? You should try living for a year trying to be a new media geek with only sparodic internet access. I agree with you about it being a warning when feeling evangelical. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the social revolution of the internet is the be-all and end-all of modern society, whilst forgetting that a lot of people have no interest in or feel they have no need for Twitter / YouTube / LinkedIn etc