Me vs. You

When comparing my internet habits to those of my classmates, I noticed two very distinct things. First, people who don’t spend that much time online, me for example, visit a select few websites repeatedly. These websites seem to be a very common thread to anyone who uses the internet. E-mail and Facebook or MySpace seem to dominate the playing field. This goes to show the age in which we are; everyone is connected to each other via some type of web portal.

The second thing I noticed was that no matter what website people visited, it fell under one of three categories:

1) Education: includes reading the news, using Blackboard, and ULink

2) Entertainment: includes music, social networking, and videos

3) Life: includes shopping, banking, and stocks

Of course, the items listed under each of these categories are not the only things that can possibly be included. Each of the topics may have subtopics and even sub-subtopics, but when I thought about it, every website can basically fit beneath one of these categories.

Not all of us, however, use the internet as much for a single category as others. I noticed that I do not spend any time online looking at current events in the world. There were a few people in the class that do. Also, I rarely shop online. I noticed people logging onto eBay, iTunes, and other shopping websites, none of which I partook in. The last difference that stood out to me was how many humorous websites people visited. It made me think, in all seriousness, that I need to spend more time laughing. I hadn’t heard of very many of the humor sites people were logging onto.

Though studying other people internet habits was oddly interesting to me, the most interesting part was plainly seeing the websites that I visit. I could have told you what websites I visited prior to this exercise but I wouldn’t have been able to venture a guess as to how long I spent online or the times at which I logged onto them.