Who knew? The long-ago sound of a dial-up modem — that symphony of shrieks and static — is still a reality for 160,000 Americans. But not for long. AOL, the pioneering internet provider, says it will finally end its antiquated dial-up service on September 30, putting its remaining Luddites "AOL": All Out of Luck.
Though I’m an extremely late adopter when it comes to technology — I’ve long called myself “Neo-Amish” — I’ll admit I stopped using dial-up long ago and haven’t looked back. High-speed internet is just too convenient.
But I can’t help but think that these few who have stuck with slow dial-up to the bitter end have something the rest of us don’t: peace of mind. In the age of instant gratification, they have a forced mindfulness. When you have to wait several minutes for a single web page to load, you are far more conscious of what you’re searching for. There is no time to get lost in an endless scroll of Instagram feeds, no casual meandering into the comment sections, and no arguing on Twitter (I still call it that). It's a simple, deliberate act: Find what you need, get it, and log off to free up the phone line.
It’s possible that most of these people are just checking their email or that they mostly use their smartphones to get online, with dial-up as a cheap backup. But I can't help but feel a twinge of jealousy. I still remember the days of clicking on a graphics-heavy website, then leaving the room to make a sandwich while I waited for it to finally download. That enforced slowness, the pause between clicking and seeing, was a valuable boundary.
We’ve traded that slow, thoughtful connection for a firehose of information that often leaves us exhausted and overwhelmed.
That dial-up modem was more than just a piece of hardware; it was a gatekeeper, an unintentional barrier to the digital excesses we now take for granted. We may never go back to those days of screeching modems and slow connections, but perhaps we should try to reclaim some of the intentionality that came with them.
What if, for just a few minutes a day, we logged on with the deliberation of a dial-up user? What would we actually look for? And what would we be willing to miss?
