Yi Chen

Pro. Mikki
Due May 1, 2019

Waste time on the Internet

How to categorize the time we spend on the Internet

I really like Goldsmith gives example on how do different generations take the word

“internet” as different meanings. In his book Wasting Time on the Internet, he shows how the

daughter takes internet as a tool of improving the interactions with other members in the

community who share the similar interests with her. “she was fully engaged, fostering and

esthetic, feeding her imagination, including in her proclivities, and hanging out with

friend.” (page 34). However, her mother just asks her not spend a whole night to “click around

on the phone”. In this way, we can see these two generations have different opinions with using

internet.

Base on the research I found, young adults with the age between 18-34 averagely spend

43% of their time consuming media on digital platforms. Almost a third of their time spent with

media (29%) comes from apps or web on a smartphone—the most of any measured generation.

(Nielsen report, 2018). But is all the time they spend on the internet should be counted as “waste

of time”? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any data shows how much we learned from the internet,

and how much time we spent on that.

The boundary between learning from the internet and wasting time on the internet in hard

to define. I totally agree with the daughter in that example that Goldsmith offered, we are not

“clicking around on the phone”. Take myself as an example, I love Japanese animation when I

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was young. But there was not a class in my school took animation as a topic. In this situation, I

want to surf the Internet and get the information I wanted. For another example, the resources

online usually come more professional than what you parents teach you, such as make up skills. I

don’t know how the last generation learn the make up skills without the internet. But I prefer to

listen from a person with professional knowledge instead of with only experience.

However, people may slowly “lost their mind” on social media. We may have a really good

start on learning from the internet, but it’s too easy for people to loose the attention on the

original topic unconsciously. When you are on your phone or the laptop, your focus can easily

“goes” to somewhere else by a simple click. The great digital pictures, words, videos, interactions

may make you throw the plan to the trashcan. In this way, you are wasting the time without

realization.

What is the reason I felt hard to make a diagram showing the proportion of time and time

wasting in a day (during making this project). There’s one of my class (WRA special topic) asked

students to gather information from specific hashtag in instagram and twitter. You have no idea

on how much time you have wasted having fun reading the unrelated tweets. The google plug

does not make sense here, because I logged onto my twitter for learning. So I can not count all

the time on twitter as “a waste of time”.

Putting time into different categories may become a question in the future, from my

perspective.

Reference :
1. “Time Flies: U.S. Adults Now Spend Nearly Half a Day Interacting with Media.” What
People Watch, Listen To and Buy, 30 July 2018, www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/
time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media.html.

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