A day in the life in the digital age
For my first blog post, I am going to describe how I used the internet yesterday, and what it helped me accomplish. When I first woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was roll over to my side and check my phone for notifications. While on my phone, I texted my friends and checked Instagram, which allowed me to get caught up on all my sports and memes. After about an hour break for breakfast, I decided to multitask, using my laptop for school work and my phone for entertainment and communication. I was using my computer to read while also responding to texts that popped up on my phone. Whenever, I got sick of reading off my computer, I decided go on my phone and spend some time on it, reading Tweets or Instagram captions. After about an hour of this, I FaceTimed a friend from home, which has allowed me to keep in touch while we are separated. After about two hours of this, I thought maybe I should go and do something, and then I did, for about five minutes. I quickly returned to my phone and computer, frantically looking at Canvas and all the syllabuses to see how much work I have to do. After realizing it was a manageable amount, I went on my laptop to play a quick game of Catan while still on my phone texting friends. After my quick stint of game playing, I returned to my phone to try and find the Declaration of Independence as audio on Spotify. For one of my classes, the homework was to read the Declaration, however, my ability to work smarter not harder allowed me to just sit back and listen with my eyes closed. This little achievement was probably the most successful thing I did all day. To reward myself for my accomplishment, I watched some Netflix, which I fell asleep to. After waking up in a panic, I realized that there was an NBA playoff game going on, and seeing that it was a one point game with ten seconds left, I rushed to my computer to watch. The game wound up being a little longer than ten seconds, as it went into overtime, but I still watched all of it. Eventually, I took a break from technology to get dinner and spend some time talking to people face to face, rather than just Snapchat and texting. But when I was done with that, I returned to my phone, and bored, I did a crossword puzzle and played some MarioKart. I then FaceTimed my friend again, then after we hung up, I watched some Youtube and fell asleep. My long day of technology usage had me at some pretty impressive numbers, logging close to twelve hours on my phone and four hours on my computer, meaning more than half of my day was spend online. All of this technology usage was not completely useless, however. Most of the time I spent on technology, I was communicating with friends on different social media platforms, such as texting, Snapchat, and FaceTime. I also used technology to get school work done, using Canvas and Google to help me find and read articles that I had to for class. And when communicating and working was not happening, I was on technology to pass time on social media, usually trying to inform myself about the world around me. Our networked world definitely makes it easy for me to communicate, work, and entertain myself, as those are the main reasons I use technology. It allows me to see my friend’s face and speak in real time, even though we are 700 miles away. I can get information and access to anything in a few seconds. And the variety of games and social media platforms there are make it impossible to not have something to do.
