What mobile internet means for me?
I’m sitting at the infamous hunger square at the college under the shade of the tall tree near the admin office, my eyes fixed intently on my 2.5” Nokia screen. My class mates are in the same place as I am, but they are engaged in varied, conversations about how they hated the programming lecture, whether or not the next lecturer will be present, what to have for lunch, why they think they’ll fail the next test and so on. One guy calls me and says, as he points to my phone, “Let me guess, you’re on Facebook right?” At that moment I stop to think, “What could have given him that impression?” Then it occurs to me, I’m sat a distance from the others, I’m not involved in their discussions, I have a phone in my hands and I’m concentrating really hard and there’s an occasional smile now and again.
To this guy watching me, this is a sign that I’m facebooking as they like to call it. Apparently, these are the symptoms of a facebooker. For the record, I’m not on FB as I explained to him; I’m actually on a VB programming forum. This guy’s question made me ask myself this? “What is it about FB that makes it so popular among students?”(I cannot think of anyone in my class who does not have a FB account, well except of course for Mathar, I doubt that she has one.)
Really, what does the internet mean to me, to my peers and students in general?
I’ll tell you what it means to me.
The Net as I prefer to call it is not just a modern invention to meet certain needs as they arise, no; it is a part of me. The internet is to me what television is to a six year old, it’s both a want and a need. If you need to shut me up, just put me in a comfortable chair, behind a computer with high speed internet (if such a thing exists in this country) and your troubles are over. My best friend is Google and I’m being serious.
When I need to know how to make homemade pepper-spray (don’t ask me why I need to make itJ), who do I turn to?
When I come across a word/phrase I don’t understand, who comes to my aid?
When I’m not feeling well and I need to find out what my symptoms mean, who do I turn to? When I’m confused over how to tackle my programming problem set what do I do?
The answer to all these is Google!!!
Of course I know that the content does not really come from Google, but it (Google) is a search engine that searches the web for words or phrases you specify, but if it wasn’t for Google, how else could I access that info? Use another search engine you say?
Hah! maybe after Google fails to give me the results I want…. Lol.
For now, I’ll stick to the big G.
So what do I do online? Aah good question. I do it all, I post to my blogs, visit tech sites to learn what’s going on in the Tech world, catch up with my subscription videos on You Tube, see what’s going on in my friends’ lives on FB, checkout any sites I might have heard of while crawling the web and research on my projects (as there are always many of them).I never run out of things to do online, no. I always say that if I can go through all the links on yahoo, then I’d have run out of things to do, but so far, I haven’t gone through them all, so I guess I still have lots to do .(Wait, is that even possible? Going through all those links…..) J
What do my fellow classmates use the net for? Let me see,
Facebook takes the cup, followed by game downloads and third on the list is image and tone downloads oh and if they have time to spare after doing all this, they do some research on school stuff. Trust me; FB is everything to these people. At my College, Marc Zuckerberg has Messiah status. What I still don’t get is why someone would risk being chased out of the internet section of the library just to check their wall . . . I do this only when I desperately need to send an email.
I guess at the end of the day, whatever you use the internet for, be it superfluous or not, the Net is a necessary part of human life.
Long Live Web 2.0
A TerraMeijar expression.