To you and to Wintermute both: When I started living in the rented apartment in Tomsk, which happened in September, I had no Internet access for months - April's going to be the second month I have it. The thing I missed most was YouTube videos. I once spent a night in the uni library just to get all of the stuff downloaded and saved to watch later. The Internet makes a lot of things simpler, quicker and/or more comfortable to do. It provides instant communication as well as archives and logs of things. It lets you do almost anything with the digital data. But to say that you can't do anything offline? To say that you can be forced to be present online? Ridiculous, almost infantile. While I do send and receive messages through the only social network I have a page in, I use it mostly to gather home assignments for a single class and search through vast array of musical tracks when I want to listen to one of them. In fact, while it's possible to do without a social network page (which I did for a few months), the latter being so comfortable in this particular network is the only reason I haven't deleted the page yet. The assignments I can also gather from the tutor directly, with no detriment for either of us, but I don't while the page is up. Most of our assignments are required to be presented in written form. The only reason I don't do a lot of them long-hand is because I have trouble writing by hand and I asked the tutors to allow me not to. We're linguists. Guess how many other faculties use the same practice in the uni (Tomsk State Uni). If I had to lose Internet access, I'm sure I'd miss some things - like YouTube videos, quick music access and one particular online game, Dota 2, - but beyond that, there are so many things to do offline that to say that Internet presence is a "should" rather than "may", that it is socially mandatory rather than a preference is a skew of values rather than a representation of reality. The Internet is useful, and there are a lot of things there that you won't find anywhere else, but you can live without it, much like you can live without coffee or swimming: once in a while, for a good measure, and if that's enough for you, that's fine. You will only miss out on things you deem important, and not to everyone Internet presence is such a thing. P.S. The incomplete list of things you can do offline: - spending time, face to face, with friends and family - cooking delicious meal - jogging/running - powerlifting - reading books by famous philosophers - solving Rubik's Cube - writing - arguing over the meaning of life with other people - volunteering - driving a motorcycle across the city - walking - having sex - bottling your own beer - cutting figures out of wood - teaching children English - arguing for a better future, on any scale, with those who can make it happen - looking good in that shirt and tie - doing homework - doing housework - sewing - farming - riding a horse - building a plane by hand - growing tea for yourself - consulting etc. By now, you should get my point.