How's life sans internet?

Disruptions of a hundred and one kinds are part of life in this part of the world. Some of these disruptive experiences could be quite shocking elsewhere, but not here. The traffic on the road may come to a screeching halt any time to the utter shock of the commuters. Hours after being thus kept waiting for reasons unknown to them, the sufferers may finally come to know that someone somewhere has been wronged and, so, the aggrieved party has blocked the traffic in protest. But why make the unsuspecting commuters the victims? But no one asks this question in this country, because it's normal. Likewise, they are not greatly surprised when the prices of essential commodities shoot up irrationally or power goes out for hours without prior notice. In fact, the members of the public have got used to many such shocking experiences the list of which can be made longer. People of all age groups have their share of such experiences and have learnt to live with them without much complaint. But what they have come up against since the midnight of Thursday (July 18) last week is quite unknown, particularly, to the youths who were born in the late 1990s or later.

The total shutdown of the internet service across the country is something they never came across as they cannot imagine life without the internet. However, those who are in their 40s or older have that experience. Their lives were once simpler and slower and were not submerged in a deluge of information like now. But after the internet came everything changed. They, too, have got so used to the internet that any break in its service turns them crazy, not to speak of the new generation to whom the information superhighway, the internet, is like what is water to fish. Worse still, internet service is no more a choice. It's now a necessity that dominates about every aspect of modern-day living. The facebook addicts, though greatly depressed by the internet shutdown, may bear the shock for some time, but how can they pass a day without the phone apps, namely, WhatsApp, Messenger and suchlike? These computer programmes allow them to talk, send text messages, share videos and other types of information amongst themselves for as long as they like and that, too, free of charge! But then these phone apps are not a mere conveyor of entertaining contents. They are also a medium of transacting serious business. But since Thursday night all such internet services are gone. The online services for sending orders for food, hailing taxis, running news service, sending money, holding business events, you name it, are not available since then.

It is learnt that during the anti-quota movement by students of universities and other educational institutions, which turned very violent and bloody, some evil quarters with an ulterior motive carried out destructive activities in the capital city as elsewhere in the country. The saboteurs at a stage burnt down the data centre from where the internet service across the nation was being provided. Hence the new experience of life without the internet has begun and the authorities concerned still appear to be quite clueless about when the service could be restored. What are the fallouts from this new kind of disruption? Even writers for newspapers, who belong to the older generation and have decades of pre-internet experience, for instance, cannot now do without the service for a moment. The various sources of information required for their write-ups, which were just a click away the other day, cannot be accessed now. It is reminiscent of the days when the hardest task for a writer was to collect reference materials before starting her/his writing. Now consider that such a writer has somehow finished (amid this internet void) his task the way he would do in the age of typewriter. Now that the government has enforced curfew in the city as elsewhere in the country to restore law and order, how is the writer going to send her/his piece to the newspaper office concerned?

The experience is no doubt tormenting even for the older generation, who never complained earlier of such temporary dislocations having to do with politics or otherwise. So, it is not hard to imagine how this internet blackout has impacted the younger generation.

But generational experiences apart, how is the entire nation faring without this essential service now out of reach? Indeed, it is now in a veritable information black hole. Commercial activities have about come to a standstill. Providers of Mobile Financial Service (MFS) are possibly the hardest hit. According a report published in this paper on Saturday (July 20), usually transactions worth Tk 35 to 40 billion would be carried out every day through various MFS providers. But following the internet blackout, the reporter of this news found that an overwhelming number of the outlets performing as MFS agents are closed. Similarly, the online automatic teller machines (ATMs) at the banks have stopped functioning to the dismay of the general users as well as the businesses who are heavily dependent on their (ATMs') service. Also, the export and import activities at the ports, the nerve centres of the national economy, have come to a halt. So have the businesses that would be transacted with the rest of the world online. In a word, Bangladesh at the moment is delinked from the rest of the world.

To be exact, of all the varieties of disruptions in communications that the nation had been experiencing from so far, none was so all-encompassing like the one that it is now going through.

The government cannot but be quite aware of the colossal losses the economy has been incurring since the midnight of July 18. The dire situation requires of the government to consider restoration of internet service with the highest priority. Time is running out for damage control. The government needs to act fast.

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