The Death of Our Beloved Wi-Fi

Written By Buddy! Magazine

Sunny Kim (AISG G11)

Sunny Kim has, unfortunately, had a little more experience necessary with bad wifi when submitting assignments.

She writes this article in the hopes that someday, we can all submit our homework and function properly without wifi having to save us.

You’re on your laptop, furiously typing away at an assignment due in the next 4 minutes and 27 seconds. Your fate now depends on these three things: mad typing skills, your ability to BS, and Wi-Fi. As you approach the last 60 seconds, you command-shift, save, save, save, rename, and upload your assignment to the dropbox. 50... 49... 48 seconds... You see the little green bar inch its way across the bottom. 30...29...28... It’s still loading, and you hover your cursor over the submit button, ready to fire that click as soon as it finishes loading. 10...9...8... What is happening??? You frantically eye the time on the top right corner of your laptop, and you notice that the wifi symbol now has an exclamation mark on it.

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You are in shock. It’s the end of the world. An apocalypse. Your deadline hit, and you haven’t submitted your assignment on time. How could your most trusted piece of technology fail you like this in times of desperate need?

Let this article help you recover from shock. First, bad wifi is a prevalent phenomenon that happens especially in times of crisis — essay due in 5 minutes, dying of boredom, or stuck with a person whom you have an awkward relationship with. However, bad wifi is obviously not caused by your essays, boredom, or personal relationships. Rather, it is caused by multiple factors such as the router, the device, the type of wifi, and bandwidth, which are things a simple google search will tell you.

“Bad wifi, regardless of who experiences it, leaves individuals unable to do anything human-like and stirs up feelings of anxiety and grief.”

Bad wifi is especially detrimental to us whenever we desperately need it. We’ve all procrastinated at least once in our lifetimes and probably experienced our hearts go boom boom boom as we watch the time and the slow green loading bar, fervently praying to god for it to load. Some of us were lucky and submitted our assignments 20 seconds before the deadline, while others, unfortunately, did not have luck on their side.

Bad wifi, regardless of who experiences it, leaves individuals unable to do anything human-like and stirs up feelings of anxiety and grief. It leaves people unable to communicate with their friends through text messaging and with the world through YouTube and Instagram. Once individuals are stripped away from our trusted internet, they often don’t know what to do. The same thing happened to me at my grandparents’ house, where WiFi didn’t exist and the only connection I had with the world were about 7 channels on the TV. I was just so bored. There was nothing I could do except talk with my family, read some books, and take a walk outside — which is what a normal, functional, human being should do. It was then I realized that the internet had slowly permeated every part of my life and that I felt dysfunctional without it. It was like the saying: “You don’t know the worth of a well until it dries up.”

“The internet makes us more vulnerable by feeding on our insecurities.”

But unlike the well, is the internet really worth it? Is it worth our fluctuating emotions and our constant attention?

The internet makes us more vulnerable by feeding on our insecurities. Being more than a mere distraction, it disrupts our sleep schedule and interferes with our work-life balance. Most of all, it gives us “FOMO” and makes us “compare and despair.” “FOMO” is an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out.” The internet makes us feel as if we are missing out every time we see that instagram post or story, or for older generations, that facebook post, that shows other friends having the time of their lives without us. This feeling augments to our social anxiety and makes us feel insecure. Then, we “compare and despair.” We compare the number of likes or followers and the spectacular experiences others have to our own dismal reality that makes our self-confidence and mental wellbeing plummet. Yet, despite knowing these consequences, we cannot seem to disconnect.

Over 60% of the internet’s users are addicted to it, with the younger generation hit the hardest. According to PEW research center, 48% of users aged 18-29 use the internet almost constantly, with the percentage diminishing as the age increases in 2019.

Internet addiction may not have the same connotation as substance addiction, but recent research suggests it may show the same symptoms, such as changes in the dopaminergic system, relating to the brain’s reward system: dopamine neurons. Too many dopamine neurons will damage the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for decision-making and impulse control. Thus, serious internet addiction tampers with the dopamine reward system similar to how drugs affect the brain, which may explain symptoms of internet addiction withdrawal: increased anxiety, moodiness, and craving for the internet.

“…we put 70% of the blame on wifi and 30% of the blame on our inability to control ourselves…”

Somewhere in the back of our minds, something — probably our rational decision-making part of our brains — asks us, “Isn’t it time to do something productive online, if we are going to be online at all?”, but our tendency to seek instant gratification makes us stay on that Youtube video or that Facebook, Reddit, Instagram page longer, altogether preventing us from doing homework earlier. Then when we try to submit our assignment five minutes before it is due and experience bad wifi, the downfall of technology seems more significant to us. Then we put 70% of the blame on wifi and 30% of the blame on our inability to control ourselves when we write the email to the teacher apologizing for not being able to submit our assignments on time. It seems very irrational, looking at it from a 3rd person’s point of view, but this is our unfortunate truth.

All in all, I don’t think the title of this article should be The Death of Our Beloved WiFi, but The Diminishment of Our Capability to Act as Rational Human Beings Due to the Rise of the Internet, which is, unfortunately, a longer and definitely less attractive title.

Buddy! Magazine
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