Think about how many times a week you use the internet. Now consider just how many times an hour you do.

If you’re anything like me, that’s a lot of time. Now imagine your life if the internet were taken away from you. No warning, no preparation – it’s just gone. Would you be able to continue your daily routines or would the loss of the internet drastically change your life?

The internet was established in 1990 and has been, arguably, one of the most useful and successful technological inventions of the modern era. According to Rob Spiegel’s “When Did The Internet Become Mainstream?” in its early stages, the majority of users were adults and large businesses. It wasn’t until around 1998 that the internet became common among teenagers as it started being used in schools through desktops for assignments. It officially began dominating teens’ time when social media made a breakthrough in 1999 when the first blogging sites became popular.

Heading into the 21st century, cellphones and other wireless gadgets became extremely popular with all generations. To this day, millennials are believed to have the highest internet dependency and attachment to smartphones, according to Statista’s report “Age distribution of active social media users worldwide.” This is due, in large part, to the fact that millennials have grown up with the internet, they have been exposed to it since childhood.

With our extreme internet dependency and the tech savvy world we live in, it is hard to believe that teenagers in the 21st century would be able to live without the internet. Millennials lack communication skills because of how easy it is to speak and express yourself electronically. Therefore, without the internet, we would not know how to talk to each other and that would be the end of life as we know it.

Another important reason that teens could not live without internet is school. The internet has become so prominent in classrooms for students and teachers that losing it would be absolutely devastating. High-schoolers are encouraged to use the internet to find information and complete schoolwork. Because students are so use to the internet’s help with assignments, most would not be able to function without it simply because we’ve never had to find information without it.

The internet is also the primary way for teenagers to stay connected with the rest of the world. Instead of watching the news, teens use Twitter or Google to find every significant event happening in the world. We don’t have to wait for a television crew to cover something or a commercial to finish, we can – within seconds – find the information we seek. Without “news at our fingertips,” millennials would be completely oblivious to the world around them, and we can’t have that!

As teenagers, we were born into the most technically advanced time in our world’s history. It would be nearly impossible for us to go without something we have had for our entire lives. Teenagers today are becoming so accustomed to the internet and social media that our dependency on it is almost unbreakable.

I do not believe anyone in the 21st century, especially teenagers, would be able to live without the internet simply because we’ve lived with it for so long – and we obviously love it!