As far as I know, the web has been treating me well. I’m always on either my phone or my computer usually trying to pass time by streaming useless videos to try to get myself to laugh. Just to further expand on the things I watch during my downtime, some of the recents from my search history include: “longest ya boiii ever,” “funny vine compilation 2019,” and “Tik Tok Funny US UK.” While all these videos are super fun to watch (and I honestly wish I was watching some right now), my love for watching silly videos sometimes makes me procrastinate way more than I should.
However, just because I procrastinate does not mean I don’t get my work done. All of my classes heavily involve the web so I am very active on all of the Washington and Lee websites. I use platforms like Box, Canvas and Sakai every single day. Other than that I also have a lot of online reading. It’s interesting because when I look up articles that I need to read, my advertising will change to whatever that specific article is discussing. I had ads involving Bison fora whole week after writing one paper on them. However, I have come to notice that this is a normal for everyone and that it isn’t all that bad. The Bison advertisements actually made me do less online shopping and even prevented my procrastination habits. The one issue I have with the whole tailored advertising scheme is that you need to be careful with what you do online as it can quickly come back to bite you if you are posting or looking up the wrong things. You may even want to turn on a private browser, especially if tailored ads are creeping you out (but who is to say that corporations can’t collect data on you even while you’re browsing privately?)
To further show you what I do during my day that has to do with media, I looked at my daily phone usage. Today, my battery usage was 49% Snapchat (lots of background usage), 10% Safari, 10% Instagram, 4% Messages, and 27% miscellaneous apps. Although the high battery usage for Snapchat may seem like I always need to interact and talk to people, that is really not the case. I use snapchat primarily to watch the side stories and catch up with some of the quick news sections that are available. I promise, I’m really not that social. Behind Snapchat, I also use a lot of battery for Safari and Instagram. As I alluded to earlier, when I’m not doing work, I generally am watching funny videos on Safari or even looking at memes on Instagram. This is mainly why these two apps use up so much of my battery life in a day. Finally is messages which honestly I don’t use too much. If I ever need to talk to someone, I generally won’t text them. I prefer to call or FaceTime people as I find it way easier to communicate with people when I can clearly hear their voice. It is not very common in this day and age for people not to text but for some reason it just isn’t my thing… mostly because I don’t need media to socialize.
So after all my rambling about my social media use, the real reason for this blog is to talk about how our inter-connected web has altered my life. Honestly, the web has made my life easier yet harder as well. The web made my “harder” because now a lot of communication comes through social media instead of face to face interaction. Personally, I find the best way to communicate is face to face but there are also times in which email is a necessity. For example, if I am ever trying to do homework and have a question, I can quickly email my professor instead of having to wait until the next day to talk about. For that reason along with others I can also say that the web has made my life easier. A lot of my school work is now online so it helps me stay a lot more organized, especially as the school year progresses. So, long story short, the web is generally pretty helpful, but I’m not too savvy with social media so I live a not so social (media) life.
(Please enjoy this math meme as I thought it related quite well to my uses of media)
