While
we all have been trying to fit with the new lifestyle abruptly influenced and shaped
by COVID-19 pandemic, then comes the internet lock down since the 30th of June
2020. Life has become really tougher. Throughout the COVID-19 lock down period,
internet has been the get go for some of us who stayed home or to spend time
with after the work hours. Attending webinars, reading, listening and watching
what people has to say across the web was the new normal since the virus has
been declared a pandemic.
Following
the killing of Hachalu Hundesa, the
famous Ethiopian singer and freedom activist and one of a kind in my generation,
on the evening of 29 June 2020, Ethiopia once again locked down its internet
services. The data network is re-opened today after 24 days of closure. The
killing of Hachalu is by every measure unacceptable and there is a lot more
reason for people to express their anger. It hit me to the core and I 100% get
it and shared it. Unfortunately, the aftermath is equally unacceptable either. The
incidence clearly shows the extent of how todays’ youth becomes vulnerable for
manipulation in the easiest way possible. It is my hope that people has taken a
lesson even if in a wrong way.
When it comes to the
internet shutdown, if people are dying in the presence of it, there is no way I
question the actions of the government. It has to protect citizens’ wellbeing and
it has to take every measure and action possible to ensure law and order. After
all the incidence has put the wellbeing of many fellow citizens in dire
situation, damaging properties and killing hundreds of them.
The
only follow up question I seek to ask now is how long and how often shall we
have the luxury of closing the internet down? Instead of building our defense
system in a more proactive way, I have a sense of feeling that we lazily prefer
to mercilessly shut everything down to almost become synonymous to a default
means for every major incidence that to happen in the country. Coincidentally, the
pandemic has already frozen most of the services that need internet
connectivity, (for the exception of the selected few who tried their heads up
to digitally stay afloat), and it may not have a bigger economic impact for
now, but how long?
Back to the
current subject line, in the first few days of the internet lock down and while
I was wondering if connection could quickly be restored, I suddenly left with
so much time to spare where I was not prepared what to do with it at all. My
normal routine was shuttered yet, I should strive for another life routine still
within the context of the larger COVID-19 pandemic. I did not foresee both
COVID-19 pandemic and the internet shutdown, yet I have to get my ass up and
keep going. Because that is life.
Strangely, for the first time since I own one, I find my smart phone less relevant in my activities. It only serves for basic calling and being a watch at most. After waiting for a couple of days, almost after a despair, I tried to find new ways including going back to old days’ routines such as spending more time with family, reading printed books which were forgotten on the shelf, reviewing offline digital resources and so on to survive the days.
In this double lock down
period, my reflection tells me that I am so conditioned to browsing that
motivating myself to go through fully offline resources takes so much of an effort
in the beginning.
A decade and half ago, when I was in a college, one of our professors used to
tell us that we should keep lessons in our memories while we were there, at
school, as his sincere advice to let us know that we would not have so many
reference materials or books in our professional life once we left school. Soon
after we left school, internet, which the professor neither have the luxury during
that time nor he foresaw its eminent emergence, becomes slowly abundantly
available, and his advice was not more than just a joke for me up until this
time.
Fast forward, this double
lock down period took me back to a time when that professor envisioned to us
back then. How would we behave in the absence of internet services and what
would have been the consequences?
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