Assignment 6

I can think of a number of reasons why everyone's consciousness should be digitized and uploaded to the Internet, the most important of which is the lack of pollen. The rest all have to do with the fact that the Internet provides us with nearly everything we need other than food. My daily bandwidth usage is evidence enough of that. This being Easter weekend, I haven't been on the Internet nearly as much as I usually am, so I'll just try to describe a typical day's worth of surfing.

The first thing I do every day is check my e-mail. I have an account for school that I check via Mozilla Thunderbird first, and then I go on Gmail to see if I have any addition mail. These days most of my mail comes through school, but some people and sites still have my original account. If either of my brothers are on Gchat, I might say hi to them, but I'm generally not in the mood to converse first thing after waking up. My next stop is Facebook to see whatever there is to see. I've been pretty true to my original intentions for joining Facebook. I only use it to keep in touch with people that go to other schools or as a sort of social calender. I don't spend hours at a time pouring over the news feed looking for new photo albums to go through. That typically doesn't take up a lot of my time. From there I go to Cracked.com. Cracked is a humor e-zine that posts articles on a daily basis. The contributors will make fun of everything that they can from History to Science, celebrities to criminals. The humor there appeals to me, so I generally read a few articles at the start of each day.

The morning is the only time I really have a set routine for surfing. Everything else depends on what I need to be doing. My Spanish course is entirely online, so I have virtual class once a week and do activities in on online textbook. Two of my classes require me to blog, so I have to work on updating both of those on any given day. I use search engines, Wikipedia, and other tools to get research done or to find facts. All of my classes have some kind of course homepage on Blackboard or elsewhere that I check frequently to double check that I'm doing the right assignment.

While I'm trying to be productive, I also suffer from what I call Internet Induced ADD. In the middle of writing a paragraph I will lose focus and be drawn to some random video on YouTube. Perhaps a friend sent me the link on Skype and I needed to check it out as a mental break. Then that video leads me to another, and another. Soon, I've spent half an hour watching Star Wars kid videos when I meant to take a five minute break. Other times the Wikipedia article I'm reading links to another subject that's far more interesting and I take a long Wiki Walk instead of getting research done. Another site that I've been getting lost in a lot recently is TVTropes.org, an encyclopedia of plot devices and works that use them. As someone who is addicted to fiction, I'm incredibly susceptible to a time-sink like that.

That's a typical day's worth of surfing for me. The Internet is a great place, though people with no sense of direction need to beware because it's very easy to wind up somewhere you never intended to be or worse. I don't actually think it would be a good idea to live on the Internet alone, but still... there's no pollen there. That Yellow Haze is killing me.