Life in the Offline

I should tell you how sorry I am for not writing anything for a while, but I won’t, because I don’t feel at least sorry about that. Mostly, I have been living a life and whenever I have had something in my mind worth writing, I have felt I don’t have nothing to say about the subject. These subjects include Iran, Ning, Michael Jackson and MySpace’s fortunate crisis. None of these crossed the line for me to come out of my shell. Then I realized why: I’m offline, and thus my line has gone up. This time I write less about what’s going on in the world, and more about my personal life, so if you’re just not that interested, then stop here. Good.

Since all readers are either spam bots (I love them, sending me comments and couraging me to continue when nobody else cares about this stuff) or my friends, I probably don’t need to say that I live in Brazil right now, learning about my life and doing an internship as a web developer, which is professionally more like being on a gap year than something that I would get retired from. As I was the reknown Facebook addict in “my circle” back in Finland, here my life is less on the web. These might be some of the many reasons:

1. Facebook is blocked on my workplace, where I spend almost 3 hours more each day than I used to in Finland, where on the other hand, usage of Facebook was more or less couraged by the working environment.
2. working from home is not supported and simply not possible for me
3. most of my friends in Europe are sleeping when I get home and online. Here people don’t use Facebook and Orkut is too myspace for my liking
4. using mobile phones is freaking expensive, so I’m not interested connecting via the beloved GPRS (and for sure I can’t afford 3G)
5. Carrying a laptop on the streets is not adviced, and wlan/wifi hotspots are not that popular and common
6. Internet just doesn’t seem all that important

What most surprises me noticing, is of coursenumber 6. Since most small businesses don’t have a website, or if they do, it is coded by the boss’s nephew and then left outdated, I don’t know what the local lunch place has on its menu today (although I know it’s rice and beans). Nor do I know what are the prices or opening times in the other one – the existence of which I happened to learn by walking past, and not by Googling. I don’t know which bus to take to go from A to B, and sometimes my credit card is not accepted when trying to buy something online. I can’t get an appointment to the doctor by a handy online form and in order to make a bank transfer, I need to go to the bank. I can’t order a taxi with an SMS and sometimes I even have to explain where I am, because of the lack of GPS.

SMS is not quite popular, since it is not very reliable, to be honest, and the usual way to get information here is calling on the phone. Calling is not exactly difficult, so of course there’s no problem. I mean, if you feel comfortable making phone calls… Probably one reason why I love the internet so much is that I hate talking on the phone. For example, I don’t keep enough contact with my family for the mere reason that the only way to do it is via telephone, and it makes me feel like a bad person. I am of the type who has to write down a script about things I’m going to say and then take a deep breath and prepare myself mentally to press the numbers and the green button. The fact, that here I have to do that usually with a language I only started practicing a half a year ago, is not making it any more comfortable.

My time here in the tropic might me teaching me more than I ever thought it would. It is teaching me what I need to learn, and what the technology really means to me. It means “relief”. It means independence. It means no extra heartbeats and misunderstandings because of bad line. It means… comfortably controlled social deprivation.

Tags: Brazil, internet