What is the longest amount of time you have hove without using the internet?
Sorted by size, the answers ranged:
- 0 secs
- just now
- dunno, let me google it
- seconds
- does time exist outside the internet?
- at least a minute
- the time it takes to use the bathroom
- 5 days (not including before)
- 1 week
- 2 weeks
- not sure; 2 weeks since starting
- 5 weeks (not including the before time)
- 1 year
- age 0-4
- age 0-5
- 6 years
- 6.5 years
- 7 years
- 8 years
- 9 years
- not long enough
This seems a fairly bimodal distribution, and it just tells me who took the question literally (and thus had to include all their pre-widespread-internet existence) and who took it to mean time since they first used the internet. I suspect that in a few years, this bimodality will shrink, as today's middle-schoolers could easily have been using internet-enabled devices in their preliterate days. Maybe even preverbal.
This post's theme word is apheresis, "the loss of one or more sounds or letters from the beginning of a word." A common example is the change in pronunciation of knife from (k-nyf) to (nyf) or the formation of till from until. Another meaning of apheresis is "a method in which blood is drawn from a donor, one or more blood components (such as plasma, platelets, or white blood cells) are removed, and the rest is returned to the donor by transfusion." I wonder if the written archivability of the internet means that written apheresis has slowed, or if the prevalence and ease-of-transmission of abbreviations will speed apheresis of letters in written words.
