#oped

4th of July is just a week away. Who else is ready to celebrate and keep the party going all through the 250th birthday of the United States of America?

If a derailment is what you want, might we suggest looking elsewhere instead of the most powerful office on the planet? Or did you forget that during your “first term”?

signed,

Stop the press, Instagram isn’t refreshing. On October 4th a few Facebook servers crashed and – quite literally- broke the internet, resulting in a sudden halt in the never-ending scrolling, liking and posting. This all lasted for six(!) hours and resulted in 3.5 billion people being unable to like each other’s perfect lives on Instagram or gossip in group chats on WhatsApp. Even the elders were denied access to their weapon of mass fabrication -Facebook. They were tough times to say the least.

I think no one has ever been so aware of the passing time since the moment those apps shut down; worse than waiting for food in a restaurant when everyone around you is getting theirs, and way worse than being on a date with someone you don’t really like.

Naturally I started refreshing the apps, tapping them again and again – they might be up any moment- but to no avail. My hands shaking because they had nothing to do. This must have also been the case at Facebook– maybe all their employees solely communicate through a WhatsApp group chat- because they couldn’t work out the problem for a good while.

Of course everyone fled to Twitter (which is pretty much the place for everyone that thinks they’re too politically conscious for sharing pictures). The mood was not grim, in true millennial style we masked our feelings regarding this issue by making jokes, we all knew everyone just had to get through this. We were all in this together. And after this we would happily scroll back to the other apps.

However, there were also people happy about this outage, which annoyed me slightly. They all go after the big technology companies while voicing their outrage on.. Twitter, right. I know the internet isn’t perfect, bad things and good things happen. We stay in touch through it, make friends because of it, but also might get bullied through it or it makes us spend too much money on unnecessary things. And yes, it might’ve been good to be off social media for a bit, forced or not, but social media in itself is not compulsory. The internet will still be here whenever you want it to be, and you probably won’t miss as much as you think.

All of this did make me realise we have become so accustomed to social media that it became part of our daily lives. Personally I found WhatsApp the ‘hardest’ app to not be able to use. I couldn’t text my mother like I normally would, even if it was just to share a cute dog picture. Though I was glad I didn’t miss the apps because I felt the urgent need to share my life with everyone, but more so to keep in touch with the ones I love.