My Internet Usage

When I was assigned to track my internet usage, I was intrigued because I know that I use the internet every day, but I have never known exactly how much time of mine was spent (some might say wasted) staring at my computer screen and into the vast expanses of the World Wide Web.
Some people may say that our generation spends too much time online. There are news articles published quite often about parents limiting their kids' time on computers and of some college kids themselves deleting Facebook and Formspring accounts. The truth is, however, the internet is an essential and necessary tool for today's college student. What is interesting to study is how much time people like me spend online.
When I first started tracking my time spent online, I paid close attention to the time I sat down and the time I got up from my computer desk. I soon realized, however, that I so take for granted sitting down for a few minutes on my computer to check an email or watch a quick video that I often found myself trying to remember exactly how much time I had spent performing such tasks an hour or so after I had done them; I had to force myself to remember to track time spent online with Post-It notes. After three days of keeping track and retroactively accounting for time spent online at my computer, I came up with these numbers:

Day 1: 1hr 40 min
Day 2: 30 min
Day 3: 40 min
Total: 2 hr 50 min

This may not seem like a lot of time over three days, especially considering how important I think the internet is to American college students today. But a few factors contribute to what I consider relatively low internet usage. First, on two of the three days I tracked, Day 2 and Day 3, I was working my part time job as a waiter. My time spent working on Days 2 and 3 combined totals nineteen hours. Naturally, I could not have been on a computer while waiting tables, and I speculate that had I not been doing so, my total would have been at least moderately higher.
One thing I didn't account for at the beginning of the experiment and probably should have tracked is smartphone usage. I've had a BlackBerry for over a year now, and I love it. I rely on it every day, and the ability to check email and surf the web on my mobile certainly cuts down on time I spend on my computer. I am on my BlackBerry during class, on the bus, at work, even in my house when I'm too lazy to get on my laptop. Thus, the total I came up with after three days of tracking internet usage is misleading, because I was accessing the internet more often than I thought to record simply because I wasn't at a computer.

The main thing that I take away from this experiment is that the internet is a big part of my life. Even according to the times that I did record, I spend on average an hour per day online on my computer. If time on my BlackBerry had been counted, the total would be even higher, proving to me that I would have a very difficult time living my life as a student without the internet.

-Zack N