Down the Rabbit Hole: Digital Dérive

Going down rabbit holes on the internet is one of my favorite activities, and something I do every night before I go to bed. One of my favorite websites to go to is BuzzFeed, it is where I go to keep up on current events, to see what is trending, to take entertaining quizzes and to shop miscellanies products that I don’t need (which ultimately results in at least 8 Amazon packages arriving at my door each week). Today when I started my digital dérive, I went to see what articles were trending on BuzzFeed. The first article that caught my eye was “38 Super Useful Websites You’re Going to Want To Bookmark Immediately”. From there I went to websites that told me the following: how many people are in space right now, the true size of countries in comparison to others, a website that tells you what to make for dinner, a flight radar, a caffeine calculator, a website that tells you to put down everything and do nothing for two minutes, a website that is only good for Christmas day, a random name generator, a website that will tell you exactly how long it will take for you to binge watch a show, a website that tells you wireless passwords from airports and lounges around the world, a website that tells you exactly how many days minutes and seconds you have been alive, a website that tells you when its dark outside if you are too lazy to go look out the window, a website that will tell you if your email has been compromised, a website that will create recipes based off of the food in your fridge, a website that calculates the cost of living compared to the place you live now and where you are moving, a website that allows you to listen to radio stations from all over the world, a website that will tell you how long it is going to take you to read a given book, a website that makes your typing look straight out of a 90’s hacker movie, a 60 second online hearing test, a website that tells you when to go to sleep to be as well rested as possible, a drawing game against Google’s neural network, a website that teaches you how to phonetically pronounce any sentence backwards, a website that tells you whether a dog dies in a movie or not, a website that finds a mid 2000s picture and has it point at your cursor, a music map that will help you discover artists, a website that tells you the shelf life of foods, a traffic simulator, a muscle wiki that will tell you exercises for any muscle you click on, a website that allows you to plug in any music video and it will send back chords to play that song, a place for ambient noise, a game that drops you at a random place in the world and makes you figure out where you are, and finally the Space Jam website in all its 90’s glory. As you can see one article on BuzzFeed allowed me to discover some of the most random websites on the internet, some interesting and some that made me wonder why they were even created. The internet is a crazy world, and the fact that I discovered all of this in under an hour makes me really concerned with the rabbit holes I fall into when I am surfing the internet for at least 2+ hours every night before I go to bed.