Well, it's been quite a while since I've posted on here! Later today or sometime tomorrow, depending on her schedule, I hope to have a vlog from one of my roommates discussing how the internet has affected her studies as a freshman in college vs when she was a freshman in High School.
Here is my article of the week; http://www.slate.com/id/2212108/
It's an article written back in 2009 about how the internet has changed since 1996.
Some interesting quotes from it:
"In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web, according to Steve Coffey, who's now the chief research officer of the market research firm the NPD Group. (Today, we spend about 27 hours a month online, according to Nielsen.)"
"The biggest site, by far, was AOL.com; 41 percent of people online checked it regularly. Many didn't do so on purpose: With 5 million subscribers, AOL was the world's largest ISP"
"To produce the directory, Yahoo employees—actual human beings—reviewed new sites and cataloged them according to a strict hierarchical taxonomy. When you typed in what you were looking for—say, "new magazine," "sexy site," or "advice on taxes"—Yahoo would search its directory and return sites that it had already reviewed. "
"There was no instant-messaging software; the first big IM client, ICQ, hit the Web early in 1997"
"The MP3 file format was invented in the early 1990s, but very few people traded music in 1996—the files were too big to cram down modems, and Winamp, the first popular MP3 player app, was published in 1997."
I think it is important to realize that at the speed that the internet is changing shape, it becomes easier and easier to become distracted. As the article states, in 1996 those who had internet spent less than 30 minutes a month on it, where as now more than 27 hours a month is spent online. And I'm willing to bet that most high school and college students spend at least 27 hours a WEEK online. Facebook has revolutionized the internet, and when there's nothing better to do, we just simply log on and stare at the screen.
Great article. I plan to use it in class to remind students about what it was like back in the day, and, as you say, how times have changed in terms of time spent online -- and the distractions that follow. What distracted us back then? TV? Video games on your TV?
ReplyDeleteI think that back then it was definitely video games, such as the gamecube or Playstation, that was the distraction. My brother and I used to spend hours on the gamecube each day because we only had dial-up internet and we couldn't be tying up the phone line with being online
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