During my time wandering the internet I first noticed that I had a hard time actually starting. I don’t think about how I usually surf the web and I realized that I don’t actually surf the web, as in starting on the search engine homepage and see where it takes me, so I found myself staring at the google homepage for a while. Whenever I open the internet its to look something up and it is usually for a specific purpose, like whether its looking up homework help or going online shopping. I then realized that I actually do a lot of my surfing on social media, like Facebook, because it is so easy to get lost in all the content that just shows up on the screen rather than you having to search for it. Because Facebook was off limits, I didn’t know where to begin.

So, I thought of sites that I have seen news stories before and brought up the Buzzfeed home page. Here, the homepage- which I realized I had never actually been on the home page- brings you to a bunch of online quizzes and celebrity articles so I had to search for their news section and found an article about how the FDA may ban all flavored E-cigarettes because of a teen “epidemic”. On that article page there were a few links to different relating articles so I clicked on the health effects of e-cigarettes like the Juul. On this page I opened up a video that was made as an attempt to not encourage Juuling in school. I first thought that it was going to be a professional PSA announcement type video but it was actually a student made, so very cheesy, PSA music video and I thought that was pretty cool.

After I watched that video another video popped up about Oprah meeting a little girl who has over 200 imaginary friends. I thought this was interesting because the two subjects are so different it makes me wonder what the algorithm is that picks each upcoming video and how do its determined.

I then clicked on a hashtag that brought me to Oprah’s youtube page and found that she had started her own web drama series called Greenleaf. It made me wonder about how she promotes her show and gets viewers because I had never heard of this series or any of her other series before.

Overall, I thought this experience was really interesting because I never think about what I’m surfing for, its a mindless act, so really paying attention to what I’m looking at and tracking how far I get was something different and made me think about how I spend my time on the internet.