What Is Your Internet Half-Life?

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The Concept of Internet Half-Life

For this particular community college, four days without Internet access wasn’t a big deal. But for many institutions, such as the large university where my Day Job is, the Net is probably considered quite a bit more critical:

• Faculty use the Net every day as they collaborate with research partners around the world
• Students rely on electronic coursepacks whose materials are gathered on Web-based resources from around the world. See, for instance, the multimedia course pack used for Professor Cecil Mackey’s course on Film and War.
• Students also rely on the Net as a research tool, connecting to freely-available Web resources, and using the Internet as a gateway into commercial databases like Lexis-Nexis and UMI's ABI Inform.

So for a large midwestern university, losing the Internet would probably hamper research and learning very quickly. Since universities still rely on a lot of printed materials -- textbooks bought by the students, paper coursepacks, books and journals in the library -- most classroom activities and homework assignments could probably continue mostly unabated. But many research activities, and a growing number of instructional activities, would be seriously impeded.

One way to measure the radioactivity of a substance is to determine its half-life. The "half-life" is the time it takes for half of the atoms in the substance to decay. Half-life can vary from a fraction of a second to hundreds of years. A substance with a short half-life emits a great deal of radioactivity during the rapid decay of its radioactive isotopes. The term half-life is also used in chemistry, in pollution management, and in other fields.

So I propose we devise the concept of the Internet Half-Life. A person or an institution’s Internet Half-Life is the time it takes for productivity to diminish by one-half when Internet access is removed. For organizations that rely on the Internet for many critical business functions, the half-life is very short -- minutes, hours, days. For organizations that rely on the Internet very little, the half-life may be much longer -- days, weeks, even months.