(no subject)

ENACOM (Ente Nacional de Comunicaciones, approximately the argentinian FCC I guess?) is now telling people that the unprecedented numbers of people staying at home is taxing bandwidth infrastructure, so people should be more measured in their internet used. OK. Except that their list of recommendations is like... "use SMS instead of WhatsApp" and "Make your text messages precise to avoid a back-and-forth conversation", alongside "limit your use of streaming video, or lower its quality"

These things are multiple orders of magnitude apart! There is absolutely no way text messages matter if people can still use streaming video (but, y'know, a limited amount thereof). One episode of a TV show on netflix should more than cover any chat apps I choose to use for the entirety of quarantine. Or the year.

Am I missing something here? Does sending pure text over the internet have an impact on bandwidth that's several orders of magnitude greater than what you'd expect from its size in bytes, or is this just completely nonsensical?

(no subject)

The reason this whole bandwidth thing (see previous post) bothers me a lot is that, look. I'm willing to do my part. If you give me a target to shoot for, weekly or daily or hourly limits or whatever is the actual problem in numbers, I will do my utmost to stay below it. I will switch all the time I was spending on Netlfix and YouTube to books, offline games, text-based websites, whatever. I will find ways to entertain myself. I will monitor my bandwidth usage. I have zero problem doing that! Because if you tell me "here's how much you can use" I can stay below it and be happy about it. Every mb I stay below my limit will make me feel good and prosocial.

But if your advice is equally opposed to streaming video in high quality and to back and forth text conversations, it seems like the takeaway you want me to get from it is "experience anxiety whenever you interact with the internet". And the internet is my main coping tool, both in general and during this particularly stressful time. It's how I keep in touch with friends and loved ones. It's how I can know what's going on during this pandemic. It's a good part of how I can pass the time at all. I can use it less, if 'less' is a number. Not if less is "y'know, just, less". I will try, anyway, but I don't know how well it'll work, because I don't know what "working well" means.

This reminds me a lot of how the messaging re: masks had people deeply suspicious, because you can't tell people "masks are useless" and "masks are important for people in need" at the same time. And, in fact, the former was a lie. This seems a lot like another flimsy lie fed to us in the hope that it will prompt the correct behaviour, and I would much prefer to be treated like a fucking adult and be told the truth instead.

And also, why in the goddamn fuck was your "conserve bandwidth" message spread as an image on social media rather than purely text.