The internet is a crazy thing. Because what is it? It can be anything because it can be used for anything. It can be a place for streaming music, watching TV, texting friends, reading a book, reading the news, watching the news, watching sports highlights, playing fantasy sports, adopting a dog, purchasing train tickets, buying shoes, directions, looking up a recipe, learning how to draw. You name it, it’s on the internet. So, what does this mean for us? As the video, “Digital Nation” points out, this means many things. 

One of which is that, since we can get all of this at the touch of our fingertips, why not do a bunch of it at once. Multitasking makes us feel more productive, even though it actually makes us less productive. But even with this knowledge that multi-tasking isn’t the best way to do things, we still do it. It’s just so easy to pick up your phone while watching the news, it’s so hard for us to resist that urge and only focus on the news. The result is that we half take in the information from our instagram feed and half take in the information from the news, and end up with very surface level knowledge of many topics.

Half of US smartphones used while watching TV

 Another thing that makes the internet crazy is that anyone and everyone can see pretty much anything you put on the internet. This causes privacy issues. Hackers steal information and companies use this information to sell us things. And then, there are things that go viral. What leads to something going viral? To me it seems completely random. For instance, a couple of months ago, the show “Tiger King” was being streamed in pretty much every household across the nation. And it seems like there is no clear reason why. What I do know, is that viral media spreads very far and very fast due to the nature of the internet. Going viral is an odd thing that unites us all. 

https://www.netflix.com/browse

Now, getting into social media. There is so much wrong with social media I think we should just get rid of it. I never post anything and rarely use any social media unless out of pure boredom. But, if social media was not there, I am sure I could find something else to alleviate my boredom. It is addictive and affects our brains in far too many ways.