Within a single day I find myself using technology mainly as a source of communication. I begin my day by checking my social media accounts. It has become a natural habit to do this as soon as I wake up. It allows me time to catch up on all the things I missed while sleeping, while also giving me an extra fifteen minutes or so in bed. I scroll through my feed on both instagram and facebook and respond to my snapchats. I then check my email, both my personal and school one, to make sure nothing important was sent to me. This is just the beginning of my web interactions for the day. Throughout the day, I find myself on canvas and Sakai checking assignment due dates or opening powerpoints that professors have uploaded for us to use as a study tool. I also found myself today emailing a professor with a question I had about an assignment that is due next class so I used my W&L email account for this purpose. Additionally, I had to log on to sapling for chemistry to complete an assignment due this week, as well as open padlet to submit my discussion questions for this class. Social media is my main tool of communication throughout the day, so in addition to my morning routine, I find myself scrolling through my phone when I have down time in the day. Our networked world clearly has a positive effect in my life as it makes it incredibly easy to access school-related materials with a click of a button, and it also makes it very easy to stay in touch with people without having to put in the effort to call or text them. I think I would say it may even encourage me to stay in contact with people more than I generally would as I am constantly kept in the loop about what people are doing with their lives. Although I find myself generally drawn to its positives, I definitely think this networked world also has its drawbacks as it can become incredibly distracting at times. For instance, I can often get lost in facebook’s feed when I could be doing more productive things with my life. I also think people are less inclined to meet up with one another face to face as it is so easy to stay in touch over these easy ways of communicating. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has definitely changed how people interact in the world today, compared to back when computers were first becoming a big thing. Overall, I find myself using technology a significant amount throughout the day, marking my digital trace in this networked world and finding it difficult to imagine a world without such ways of communication.
