【非文青N周一文】Toastmasters speech #7: One Day without the Internet

 

CC#7, title: One Day without the Internet (5-7 minutes)

Introduction by Mr. Toastmaster: Last week, Donald's humorous speech on "7 habits of highly ineffective people" listed "surf the net" as the 7th habit to make people highly ineffective.

This gave 非文學青年 an idea about what to talk about for her CC#7 project:

Research your topic, i.e. what if I don't have internet for one day? Is internet making us ineffective? So she did an experiment. 非文學青年's objectives are: collect information about the topic from numerous sources (obviously, she can't collect information without the internet); Carefully support her points and opinions with specific facts, examples and illustrations gathered through research.

 

Last week, Donald made a humorous speech saying surfing the web makes you highly ineffective. Joking aside, it made me think: Is the internet helping us to be more or less effective? So I started thinking about doing an experiment, to deprive myself of the internet for one day. But before I started, of course, I googled "one day without the internet". It turned out my idea wasn't that original. Many people had tried this experiment. There were studies, even in my home country, China. A 2009 report showed that among all teenagers who use the Internet, 9.7 percent are addicted to the internet. Then I googled "internet addiction", an internet addiction test came up. It had 20 questions about your online behavior, questions like: How often do you find yourself saying "just a few more minutes" when on-line? I took the test. Before I knew it, 20 minutes had passed. oh, where was I? I was going to experiment a day without the internet. That wouldn't be possible to do on a workday because if I didn't use the internet, I couldn't access the data on the server, couldn't reply to my coworkers' emails, couldn't see my calendars and would miss all my meetings. Ok, I decided to do the experiment on Sunday.

This past Sunday, I woke up and got my coffee, but something was missing. I didn't have a newspaper and I couldn't go online to read the news. No problem, I went to starbucks and bought one there, but it made me look a little bit ancient. What was worse, it took a long, long time for me to get ready, get out the house, drive to starbucks, order my coffee and skim through the newspaper while drinking coffee. In addition, my husband had to be at home to take care of the two kids by himself while I was gone.

Speaking of the kids, we had to go to a kid’s birthday party on Sunday. I asked my husband where the birthday party was. He didn't know because it was an evite sent to me. In order to follow my internet ban, I had to ask my husband to log in to my email and read that evite. I know it was kind of cheating, but well, it was an experiment. My husband checked the evite. The party was at 11 in Shady Park, Long Beach. Where the hell is Shady Park? Google map? oh, the internet again.

The party went well, except that when people talked about the Olympics, I was about 12-24 hours behind because the newspaper I read was not as up-to-date as online sources and social media platforms.

Before the end of the day, I had to stop the experiment because I got into an argument with my husband. He said the internet was invented by a British guy while I believed it was an American. We had to ask google to be the judge for this matter.

In conclusion: the experiment deprived me of the internet for one day, but it made me appreciate it more. The internet has become such an indispensable part of our lives that it can provide a great deal of convenience in terms of work, family life, entertainment and social activities. It is not just a tool to find out the details of Tom Cruise's latest divorce, but it is a valuable resource for information. And as a conflict mediator, it could even save your marriage. So I have to disagree with Donald: surfing the net is not a habit that makes people highly ineffective. Used wisely, the internet can make you highly effective and knowledgeable. As to who invented the internet: oh, wait a second, let me google it…