Okay, I have to admit I went into that google video a little skeptical (while there are some great points made, I'm still not sold on the concept that advertisers targeting ads to specific customers is a bad thing), but it was both awesome and respect-lessening to have all that show up in the shape of Darth Vader. I laughed too much to take the rest of it as seriously as they wanted me to.

As for the rest of the post. The "coping without the internet" question is definitely interesting. When I was 12-13 and the internet wasn't as pervasive as it is today, I had a one hour time limit per day for internet access. I didn't have youtube or facebook or livejournal or a jillion websites taking up my time, but what I did have on the internet was friendship. I didn't have a lot of friends in the real world, and even those I did see every day we found it easier to discuss important concepts (my depression, a friend's struggle with ADD) on the computer. And when that hour was up, I would be devastated not to be able to finish a conversation. These days, it still depends on my friends - I have far more connections through the computer than I do IRL, mostly because it takes me a long time to make friends. I'm in college right now and have made a handful of new ones, but the internet is my connection to the people I already knew. If no one's online I have no problem coping without the internet; if I need to talk to people, I go crazy without access.

Also of great interest is Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think," which more or less outlines the World Wide Web in 1945, and may qualify as the single greatest piece of "futurist" writing of the 20th Century:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/

I think it's interesting to note that, unlike many corporations that collect huge numbers of products and brands, Google actively sets out to maintain a good name and reputation associated with its products, resulting in people generally liking them and feeling good about them. Instead of having a reputation for bad labour practices, they have a reputation for being one of the best places to work of all time; instead of having a reputation for ignoring customer complaints, they have a reputation for responding quickly to massive outcry (the Google Buzz problems, for example, were tackled very quickly, although they really should have been caught long before Buzz was released); they have a reputation for being environmentally-friendly; and so on, and so forth. Even if those reputations are undeserved-and they may very well be- it makes people hesitant to criticize them even when they are most definitely doing something wrong (case in point: Google books). Even very smart, privacy-oriented people have a knee-jerk reaction of defending Google if you say bad things about them.

That video was all true! Except for the part where my husband pays for my shopping.

I'll admit, I have no idea how anyone in my field functioned without the internet. I'm a social scientist (but not a sociologist, I'll note), and I just can't imagine doing my work without being able to search for articles online (even if you couldn't download them - that was often an issue even a few years ago). And if you take away computers entirely, the idea of transcribing and analyzing interview or classroom video data by hand would probably turn me to another career entirely.

I think I would be a "slightly disagree" on "I could cope without the internet". As you say, it's not like I would lose the will to live, but my life would be COMPLETELY different in every respect. Basically my life as it is would cease to exist and I would have to become a different person. My job would look different (well, it wouldn't exist - I am in charge of an online database). My social networks would disappear and I would have to make real life friends (oh noes!) My source of news would be limited to local print media. I would cook less interesting and exotic recipes. I wouldn't be a blogger. I would have to find new hobbies. I would probably own a TV instead.

I was without the internet (or access to any media or communications technology) for two months last year during fieldwork in a remote community. And I was a completely different person. My life was different. I didn't DIE but I wouldn't say I "coped" if we define cope as carrying on as normal.

My parents got dial-up when I was around 15, so I've had access to the internet for 14 years now. Of course things have dramatically changed, but in college I noticed something very strange...

I was 21 and living off-campus. My roommate was away and I was completely alone in the apartment. I generally preferred the solitude, but on that evening my dial-up was out.

The entire room felt *different.* It took me a while to figure it out, but when I had internet access there was a distinct feeling of connection, even if I wasn't chatting with anyone. With it gone I felt very alone. It was weird.

Every now and then I puzzle over it. I find it fascinating how our brains process things sometimes. ^_^

I have to wonder how translation of the question affected the "coping" without the internet question. If it were a difference of as much as "Could you cope without the internet?" versus "Could you function without the internet?" it would be vastly different.

Personally, I wouldn't mind just not using the internet for a while, except for the fact that my university expects me to check my email as the only means of communication between student and professor.

"You couldn’t cope without access to the internet? What does that mean, exactly?"

Well, it would be a little impossible to turn in the homework for my internet based class, for starters....

And since

1) I cannot afford to quit my job and either take classes full time or move - which is what the non-internet based MLIS programs available to me in CA would require

and

2) I would be less likely to have the job I have if I wasn't going to school....

...I would definitely say that "not having access to the internet" would be very difficult to cope with.

(and that's not even counting how annoying it is to try and get anything done when our servers at the library are down and we can't even access the freakin' catalogue.)

"But would I say I couldn’t cope without it? I would be very unhappy, but I wouldn’t, you know, become entirely incapable of functioning and give up the will to live, I don’t think. So I don’t know what to make of that."

That's about it.

I mean, I remember the very first time I saw a real-world advertisement that featured an Internet address: 1995. We weren't out banging rocks together to start our cooking fires back then. I went to libraries more often, read more newspapers and magazines, and bought these things called "compact discs." Oh, and I remember going to the office of someone called a "travel agent" for assistance in booking a ticket to the United Kingdom. That was strange. Otherwise, we enjoyed a reasonably modern lifestyle.

Hmm. I go hiking and camping and cope without the internet all the time, but never when I'm actually living in society. If the internet were suddenly taken away from me but I was still supposed to live and function in a society where everyone else had internet, it would be very hard to cope if not impossible.

But if I was in a world where everyone else suddenly lost internet too, I would easily be able to cope. So I suspect some of it is how you interpret the question-- are you supposed to be giving up your internet while everyone else has it, or did we all lose it at once? How long? Could we get information off of it (like contacts or recipes saved on websites) first? Important questions when you're dealing with a linked-in culture like Japan.

the coping thing is extremely vague, probably it means more about what specific translation was used when asking people from other countries about whether or not they can cope without the internet than about coping as we understand the word in english.
For example, in portuguese, I imagine coping would be translated as words that would more literally mean something like "bear it" or "survive", which I would imagine people would be shocked that someone would ask them that (although we do use "survive" rather loosely), but clearly everyone would say "of course I would bear it or survive it, what do you mean would I die without it?" which is the same thing you are saying about "coping" but in these portuguese translations I think the negative response feels even more extreme than "not coping", perhaps that could explain why Brazil had the highest percentage of "Strongly Agree" responses. If someone responds "no, I could not bear it, I would not survive, I could not cope" I read it as a clear symptom of anxiety and there is probably a whole list of things they could not cope without.

My favorite item was "The internet is a good place to find a boyfriend/girlfriend."

A good *place*. Minor semantic flub, or demonstration of complete lack of understanding of what the internet is?

I've lived almost completely off the grid before: no electricity, no running water, just a single landline telephone, and a ten mile drive into town, and I still managed to get online at least once a week or so, at the local community college. "Could you cope without internet?" is an interesting thought experiment, I guess, but unless it's a self imposed limitation, it's not likely to happen anywhere in the US, at least. At this point, my household's income comes from college loans and a job with Amazon, so if the internet suddenly died tomorrow, we would not be able to cope economically.

As for the evil Google thing, privacy in technically advanced society is going to die, and there isn't much we can do about it. If it's not Google, it will be another company.

In case it sheds some light on the staggering numbers of Japanese people who responded that they couldn't cope without internet... I'd like to point out that most Japanese people access the internet with their cellphones. Rather than sending SMS or making phonecalls they send emails to communicate with their friends.
So my guess is that many of the Japanese respondents correlated internet with the cellphone and would therefore feel very cut off from the world without it. However, people in North America think of internet as more of an at home activity on the computer (as the number of people with blackberries or iphones is much lower than Japanese people with cell phones connected to the internet).

I think the "couldn't cope" aspect might be speaking to how much the Internet is being used by a person. If part of your regular routines and errands are done online (shopping, paying bills, staying in touch with people, researching, doing some business online, communicating with friends you only know online), and that gets taken away, I would imagine it would be fairly difficult to "cope" without the Internet.

That video certainly is interesting. It's weird to think they were already predicting the Internet sort of as it exists today in the 60s. In 1990 Douglas Adams did program called "Hyperland" which predicted the future use of the Internet in a different way: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470#

Re the comment that people couldn't cope without the Interne: My mom passed away this week, so I found myself in another city on short notice and where I was staying I didn't have internet access, and I have to say, I really couldn't cope. I admit the context was pretty stressful anyway and I was probably way more fragile than normal, but trying to arrange a funeral without instant access to goggle maps, to directory pages, web pages and my email very nearly pushed me over the edge. I needed to arrange flowers -- but the 1-800 flower people asked me for the name of the arrangement I wanted from their webpage display; I wanted to arrange a funera home, but I had to actually try to figure out what I wanted based on ads in a phone book and the vaguest knowledge of the city -- no maps? No online advice or checklists? No access to email to inform people? To ask who wanted to do what in the service? To place an obituary in the newspaper, I had to find a cyber cafe and email the text to them because that is the only way they would accept the text. I literally had to phone my wife in our home town and ask her to email and look stuff up for me. It was a very dramatic lesson for me as to how completely dependent on Internet access I have become.
In contrast, I'm currently typeing this comment on an intercity bus on my way home...I of course chose the busline which offered free internet.

Everyone shoud view YouTube video of "Everything's amaxing, and nobody's happy."

"The fact that 45% of respondents said they couldn’t cope without the internet has also gotten quite a bit of attention."

I was more shocked that so many people said that they COULD cope without the internet. Is that just a problem on my end?

Well, I can say that nowadays, almost everything is on the internet, and it's an important part of people's lives. For instance, I can say I wouldn't know what I'd do without my online business and articles like https://www.pandadoc.com/blog/how-to-create-a-proposal-quote-in-salesforce/ that help me improve my working process, and I'm pretty sure that even people who don't have anything like that got way too used to the internet.

I see a great achievement of modern technologies in the opportunity to work with experienced and top-notch specialists from all over the world. Moreover, now there are no problems at all with finding and hiring developers thanks to such studios as Binary Studio, by contacting which you can hire node js developers and start developing a product that perfectly meets the needs of your business.

I can say that many people depend on the internet in order to work, and I totally understand that. Not so long ago, I decided to develop my own gambling platform, and I managed to discover RunYourOwnPokerSite.com to get a solution with all the necessary features. And I have no idea what I'd do without the internet, to be honest.