Unconnected in a Connected World

One thing this great inter-connected world of ours does is lend itself to vast doses of paranoia. It is more than conceivable that an absence of texts, emails and BBM's simply means no-one actually wants to contact me. Not even the direct mail companies, or the relentless communications from people and places I thought I'd successfully 'unsubscribed' from ages ago. But we now judge our self-worth by the number of times we're wanted in the connected world. Our facebook friends, and the number of followers on twitter - is it really possible to over-rate the monumental importance of these frivolous things?

Well, after a day of communications silence, I did sneak a look onto twitter (via an alternative, working source naturally - an old fashioned computer) and discovered that thousands of users around the world have been suffering the same high levels of inconvenience, unable to access the latest junk mail, or read the most recent banal meanderings of their BBM friends. Yes, the Blackberry server in Slough (?!!) has been down for much of the day. And don't mock now, but the Slough server is responsible for not just the UK, but the Middle East and Africa as well. I hadn't realised how much the freedom fighters of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya really owe to Slough. But at least I could breathe an artificial sigh of relief as I realised that no communications hadn't quite spelt social death. Writing about it on the other hand......