A friend of mine came up with an interesting expression the other day for people who refuse to use the Internet: internots. Do you know any internots? I'm sure some of you have parents or grandparents who claim a total lack of interest in the digital world. They're usually the same people who only got a mobile phone a few months ago, and asked for one «that just makes phone calls».
A certain amount of prudence in using the Internet is sensible. In the United States there are growing calls for legislation on the amount of personal details – email addresses, birth dates and credit card numbers – companies store in their databases after harvesting them online. It has also emerged that Apple keeps track of the locations of its Iphones. If laws are passed that make gathering data from Internet users more difficult, it will have implications for customer relations strategies.
In the meantime, the world's last typewriter factory, in India, recently closed. This reminded me that I once lived in a world without personal computers, mobile phones or even faxes. My first articles were written on a typewriter. If my watch was slow and I wanted to know the precise time, I had to phone «the speaking clock». There was a phone number for the weather forecast, too. The Internet may be omnipresent and occasionally frightening, but I can no longer imagine life without it.
