Through the Cyber Rabbit Hole
At first when I thought about starting this assignment, I thought it would be difficult. I’m always on Facebook on my phone, it would have to be extremely difficult to do on my computer. However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I would be able to complete the challenge and surf the internet without going on Facebook for forty minutes. I sat down at my computer and the monitor; with the monitor I am able to consume twice as much media at the same time. I sat down and started, forty minutes later I had done it. I started off on YouTube and decided to see where it would go from there. I have videos from channels that I watch almost every day so I started there. As I started to watch the videos, time started to move more quickly. I watched one video that was more news then entertainment so I went to the other screen and decided to go to buzzfeed.com. Buzzfeed is good because you can get lost in their articles in an endless internet loop. You can start at an article about the coolest gadgets of today and end up taking a quiz about which type of pasta you are. While on Buzzfeed I started off with an article about dogs and how amazing they are. Then I switched to an article about item from the 1990’s. The article was a list of items from the 90’s that will make you say “Oh yea, I forgot about that.”
That article was a short trip down memory lane, there were a lot of pictures that brought me back to my time as a young child. Once my news video was done I headed back over to YouTube. Back on YouTube I watched a little bit of highlights from late night T.V. talk shows. I also watched some of the Buzzfeed show Worth — it. I continued down the YouTube rabbit hole for a while and then realized the forty minutes were up and decided it was best for me to be done with the internet for the day since it was probably around midnight. When completing this exercise, I didn’t know if I would be able to do this without going on Facebook. Afterwards, it turned out it wasn’t actually that difficult. The time passed quickly and I didn’t even feel the need to go onto social media. I wish that I would have branched out more though. Maybe if I would have started on the randomize sections of Google or Wikipedia maybe I would have found some more interesting things online. In the past I’ve found myself pages and pages away from where I had started online. In my opinion, Facebook has made it harder to become an internet flâneur, however, it’s not impossible. You just have to be willing to go out of the way to get to where you want to go. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to try this again and see where my mouse will take me.
