You woudn't be reading this....

Earlier on today I found myself fretting about keeping up with all the various sites, blogs, forums and general places of merryment that I've been using over the last few years. I was wondering about which ones to phase out to be more realistic and, more importantly, to actually use some enough to warrant me going to them.

That isn't the point of this post though. Well, I suppose it is - kind of.

What I did start to think about is what would happen if the web just.....stopped. I mean, it's so normal now we give it a single three letter name and even people who've never used it kinda know it exists.

You're there picking up your email and the whole thing - servers, DNS tables, routers - just stops and doesn't come back.

Just think what chaos would ensue.

It's hard to even list the changes we'd see - the effect would be so wide ranging - both directly and indirectly - that most things would be affected.

Think of something - anything at all.

Business, home, education, shopping?

Yep, they'll all feel the hit.

Take simple shopping for example. You'd have to go to the shop to buy something like a CD, at least in the medium term until the internet shops reverted back to mail order adverts in magazines. That old way of selling would have long since been forgotten.

Some wouldn't come back at all and for those that did the prices would rise to cover the extra costs thus allowing shops (real brick places with overheads) to start to raise their prices again and sales would invariably fall.

Imagine business too - inter-office email, reporting, news gathering and monitoring. Stocks and shares, import/export.

Everything.

Graphs would fall around the world. Even if somebody designed a replacement it would take a while and companies, jobs and livelyhoods would go to the wall.

So next time you're ordering your new car, downloading your 13th album by Global Boy Band Inc or the latest papperazzi snaps of a model (no, I'm a singer really) airhead just stop and give the web a metaphysical hug.

We're locked into this more than we realise - "web" was the most apt name they could have chosen, though they may not have realised that at the time........