Have you been a victim of the widespread outage of Rogers this week? What was your level of anxiety? How many times have you turned your phone off and on once more hoping to see the four little bars that make up the new measurement of our oxygen saturation?
I can tell you that this forced collective disconnection allowed me, once once more, to see how dependent I am on my phone. The duration of this blackout was long enough for me to analyze my addiction and understand its intricacies.
First of all, the withdrawal symptoms were very little related to my inability to receive or make good old phone calls, but rather to my inability to have quick or even instant access to information . As if the phone call was a vestige of the past, the habit of another generation. Besides, I curse every call that might have been a text message, and every message in my voicemail that might have been an email.
It is not the forbidden desire to join and to be reachable that worries me. The object of my frustration was therefore something else.
I was not expecting any particular news and I knew that I would not necessarily receive urgent emails. Nothing of the sort. But knowing that I was potentially missing some media news or announcement (on social media, for example) gave me a feeling of stress that was relatively disproportionate to the context. Especially since, supposed to be on vacation, I had promised myself and I had sworn to those around me that I would take the opportunity to “disconnect”.
Our relationship with technology, with what are now extensions of our arms and our heads, is therefore more complex and profound than we would like to admit. Access to reliable and extensive networks is no longer a luxury, but rather a non-negotiable requirement of consumers who always need a dose of connectivity. All the more so when we are heavily penalized for the poor choice of suppliers, compared to Europe or Asia, for example.
Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne is right to want to ensure that breakdowns like this do not happen once more, since they also handicap commercial transactions. But isn’t it time to broaden the question and make it easier for new players to enter the market? It seems to me that a little competition in telecommunications would not hurt anyone.
