South Park Takes on Internet Addiction

Recently on South Park, the entire town was going crazy because the Internet had stopped working. No more porn, no more Myspace, no more YouTube; it was all shut off. People were acting like zombies, walking around aimlessly, not sure what to do with themselves. Then they went into a whole Grapes of Wrath sequence, which a lot of people didn't get. Really, who has seen this 1940 film recently?

Anyway, this made me start thinking: what would America do if the Internet just quit working? I thought in particular of booking a hotel, because an older co-worker asked me to try to find one on hotels.com that was near a certain area. She said something like "isn't there something on the computer where you can find hotels? I think my daughter uses it." Back in the ol' days, people would have to call the operator and ask them for the phone number of hotels in a certain area and then call around to check the availability of rooms. Or they could call the place that they are trying to find a hotel close to and ask someone there for the names of nearby hotels (and numbers, if they happened to know them), and then call the hotels. People had to have a much higher degree of patience with other people, because you had to deal with them a lot. You also had to call friends to talk to them; call companies when you had questions about a product or service; call airports to book flights; you get the idea. As attached as we are to our cell phones today, we really did rely on telephones a lot more two decades ago.