Online Impatience

Today as I was on my Android phone download apps, (which actually means doing absolutely nothing) I noticed that the progress bar was at a standstill at 20%. Even though this standstill was for about 16 seconds, I was not only infuriated, but I actually thought that my phone had broken. And of course, after the long quarter-of-a-minute wait the phone worked completely fine.

I notice these kinds of things all the time with all sorts of online-based technologies. The sad fact is that I'm not alone. Nearly every kid or teenager in the United States has this selfish infuriation: and I have a hypothesis for as to why.


Adults do not have as much of an obsession to extreme quickness, as they have not grown up in the digital-age and also have had more of their adult life to learn to cope with slower internet. Kids and teens (say, born 1992 and on) were born after the world wide web was established and by the time they were using it, had already had access to high speed internet. Nowadays, with ultra-super-awesome speed internet, it seems uncanny to kids and teens to be hampered by even a handful of seconds online.

I think this also goes with the American value of speed and strength over quality perhaps. In America I think we have a habit of choosing the best-looking, fastest, strongest, and definitely biggest things over perhaps the best. You see this everywhere: the flashier it is the more it sells. And online the faster you get to a website (it doesn't matter how good the website actually is it's all about looks apparently) the better.