The Internet at home - a member of the family

The virtual world of the Internet can take over from the real world, in the hours spent on it.

I am rather like an old lady I knew in Collingwood who still had gas lighting in the 1950s because she believed electricity seeped out of power sockets. What is happening to all these mystic waves that now take billions and billions more messages across cyberspace and in some way, surely, real space or time? Can they have any effect on anything else, or reach a tipping point? Or suppose there comes a Final Hacker?

Libraries confide all they possess to the constantly obsolescing technology of the computer. We might think back to whether the mysterious stone circles of the past could possibly be all that remains of a great civilisation that became too virtual. And then, perhaps suddenly, through obsolescence or a master hacker, all its great intangibilities just disappeared. The wood or wicker of the visible civilisation decayed; its civilisation, which was mostly cyber, was gone. Only the stones of that “Stone Age” remain.

Round the decay of our own colossal wrecks, if we have left no other memorial, what lone and level sands may one day stretch far away?

This is not being dismal or dystopic, but it does suggest that back-ups are desirable, and that those backups should not be just virtual. "Life is real, life is earnest" and level three of a computer game is not its goal.