All you need is...wi-fi?

Recently we went on a trip and were surprised that the place we were staying at did not have Wi-Fi.  We realized how dependent we are on the Internet to allow us to make plans with local friends, find out where the nearest grocery store is located, look up the bus routes, and stay in contact with work and family back home.  Without Wi-Fi our smart phones were not so smart.  Feeling this stress, I really laughed when I saw this meme's play on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

Published way back in 1943, the original theory tried to explain people's motivations.  Maslow was a Humanist and believed that people are motivated in more complex ways than are animals.  His concept was that a more Basic Need needs to be at least partially satisfied before a person will start to desire fulfilling a Higher Need. 

To put it simply, once you have shelter, enough to eat, drink, and have a sexual partner (Physiological) and you feel safe and confident in your daily life (Safety), you start to want to have relationships that go beyond the physical (Belonging-Love).  This is the emotional connection that we share with our romantic partner, but also our bonds with friends and family.  Next is a desire to feel good about yourself as a successful person (Self-Esteem) often through performance at school or at work.  Once these basic needs are satisfied, Maslow believed that a person would be drawn to Self-Actualization.  He wrote:

...we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming (p. 382).


Or as a current Reebok ad would say, once we have those other needs we will have an urge to "Be more human."

So when I was stranded without Wi-Fi at the start of my vacation, was I really missing a basic need that would win out over food, shelter, water and other Physiological Needs?  Probably not.  In fact, I would argue that once those needs are taken care of, the Internet helps us fulfill all those other needs:

My world is more predictable and I keep myself safer when I use my smart phone to look up addresses and bus schedules.  I can make plans with friends and stay in touch with people, even in other countries, over social media.  A lot of my work and even this blog post involves access to the Internet.  And if I am going to "be more human," my creativity can be inspired by and posted on the Internet to inspire others (see, there IS a reason for Pinterest).

So I would redraw the Hierarchy meme like this:

Now, you might not agree with that - and even Maslow noted that there are individual differences in what people need most.  Some recent surveys commissioned by Google and by Bank of America imply that we might even give up certain Physiological needs if faced with the loss of of the Internet or of our smart phones.  For example, a poll by BCG showed that 21% of us would rather give up sex than lose Internet access for a year; 13% of respondents to a survey by Braun Research Inc. agreed that they would give up sex if their smart phones were taken and that was the only way to get them back!  What would you give up?

Read more about those studies and find a link to an Internet Addiction online quiz (ironic, right?) below.

Update:  The Meme-verse has found an even more basic need than Wi-Fi: a charged battery. What good is a signal if your device cannot turn on?



Further reading:

Psych Central's version of an Internet Addiction quiz.

A Washington Post article of "A Complete List of Things People Would Give Up for the Internet." This includes references to the 2012 BCG study (the stats on what people would give up instead of losing the Internet for a year are found in the pdf file under Country Profiles) and a similar report in 2015.  It also links you to the results of the survey done by Braun Research Inc. on smart phones.

You can access Maslow's original paper through PsycArticles at your public university library.  Maslow, A. H. (1943). Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370-396.