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Please, step away from the internet

I remember getting all excited back in early 1998 when 7amNews reached the astonishing milestone of 100,000 user-sessions per day.

Boy, that was a lot of traffic!

Less than a year later it was up to 650,000 user sessions a day and I was equally "over the moon".

At its peak (shortly after I sold it in 1999), the site was doing almost 5 million user-sessions a day and had a presence on a quarter of a million other webpages across the face of the globe.

Those were mind-blowing numbers way back in the infancy of the internet and being ranked in the Nielsen ratings "top 20" was a buzz I'll never forget.

But my, how the internet has grown since then.

Now Google have announced that their image-search alone is serving up over a billion page-views per day and FaceBook has a "population" of 500 million users.

And all this just a decade or so since using the word "internet" in polite conversation would see people looking at you oddly as the word "geek" ran through their minds.

Back then almost nobody had email addresses and a pretty large percentage of the tiny internet population expressed themselves through their "home page" -- because social networking sites simply didn't exist.

Hooking up to the Net was a dial-up affair, something that required you to effectively disconnect your phone from the rest of the world for the duration of the online session.

Now every man and his printer have an email address, home-pages are "so last decade" and DSL means we can update our HomeFace page while we ride our eDonkey all the way to Twitterville.

Some people now live such an insanely "connected" life that they would surely suffer a major mental breakdown if you took their connectivity away for more than a few minutes.

Whereas we used to think ourselves lucky if we had more than a dozen or so true friends, now people use their FaceBo friend-count as a metric of their success and the worst thing you can do to them is "unfriend" them (oh the humanity!).

I wonder what happens if we extrapolate this meteoric growth in our reliance (some would say dependency) on this 24/7 connectivity?

If someone had told me back in the late 1990s that a surprising number of people would use the internet to give others a running commentary on the minutia of their lives via a service like Twitter, I'd have been wholly skeptical. However, having seen what's happened now, no predictions in respect to the next decade would surprise me.

Obviously mobile communications is going to be "where it's at" in respect to our ongoing infatuation with staying connected -- but just how much more connected can we be?

Email, SMS, Twitter and IM give is the ability to contact almost anyone, any-time, anywhere on the face of the planet -- what more could could we add to this mix?

Or might there be a rebound reversal of the pendulum swing soon?

Could it be that people will soon tire of this endless stream of emails, tweets and txts, to the extent where they opt to disconnect from the cyberworld in search of a little peace, tranquility and privacy?

Just over a decade ago, being connected was utopia. Might the definition of utopia in another decade's time be the chance to get away from this wired world and spend more time alone with our own thoughts?

Perhaps laying on a beach somewhere with a good novel will once again become "the thing to do".

And if you finish that novel before the sun sets you can just log in to Amazon or iTunes with your eBook reader to download another -- and maybe check your email -- Doh!

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