How consequent are you limiting the time spent on the internet?

This includes cell phones with internet access like iPhones and Androids as well as consoles that are used for browsing. My question refers only to the time you spend browsing random sites, forums, youtube, pr0n, researching silly things, lurking on irc servers, trying to figure out the answer to a technical question some forums user threw at you... stuff like that, stuff that you don't really enjoy but do anyway, almost like work.

I'm asking because I sometimes find myself wasting an entire evening lurking in forums & reading stuff on wikipedia that doesn't really interest me at all. I admit that I am really bored right now because I'm in the middle between work and university, but I know I'm not the only one who's annoyed by this habit. What makes it so tiresome is that you are not actually gaining experience, like by reading a book, watching documentaries or anything you could feed your brain with. Internet memes are a good example, they are as nutritious as a twinkie but most of us know pretty much all of them plus a thousand variations of each. We could have read War of the Worlds 20 times instead of watching cute panda sneeze all day

I think you know what I'm getting at by know. I'm actually trying to limit my time I spend online and it works pretty well when I have something to do, like work. I also never had a modern mobile phone and I have no intention on browsing the web when I get one (which is soon). I hate it when people do that, check status messages on facebook while other people (-> I) try to keep a conversation going. I don't want the internet intruding my life outside my house.

Anyone else annoyed by that time consuming medium?

/rant
:luigi::mario:

 

Well it is, you can start a hobby that you liked to do but not related with the intertubes
Playing guitar or some kind of instrument is good.

 

What is the question?

 

If you manage to limit the time you spend on the internet.

Or maybe you don't and are available on social networks & forums all the time. Do you feel that it enhances your everyday routine or do you think it keeps you from doing other things sometimes? I know it exhausts me, hence my effort to decrease my online time.

 

Ah OK The title doesn't make sense!

I am good at managing the time I spend online. I usually check a forum or two in-between projects for a bit of downtime, to reset the brain. I do the majority of my browsing and forum activity whilst having coffee in the morning at home, or during the train ride to the office.

I am not on social networks.

 

well, I took the time to read all this so... ;-)

 

It doesn't annoy me particularly.
I use it mostly for researching stuff and entertainment (such as youtube, reading blogs of interest, etc).

Personally, what I love is the ease of access. The only problem in my perspective is that probably that same ease of access that I love will be taken for granted by kids in the future, thus rendering it pretty much obsolete

 

I think there's a bit of exaggeration here. People are more different than that.

I don't know "all the memes" (never heard about that panda thing and that's not really interesting to know).

And I browse game forums because I enjoy them. There's nothing that I do online that "I do anyway and don't enjoy".

I can say that I spend a lot of time shopping, though. =D (more than I really want)

 

I sorta know what you mean. Very often I'll get on my computer or my iPhone with a very simple purpose in mind - example: to figure out what the color palette for the Mega Drive was. I'll start with that simple purpose in mind, and before I know it I've clicked on 10 links, watched youtube videos, posted some long rant on ASSEMblergames, etc. What was intended to last a few seconds instead lasted several hours.

The internet is addictive, there's no doubt about that. I do try to limit it, but it's very difficult sometimes - especially if you have a lot of free time. I usually enjoy browsing the internet, but it's true that very often there's something much better I could be doing.

It has a lot to do with laziness - the internet is right at your fingertips. Almost anything else requires physical and/or mental effort of some kind. The internet taps into the pleasure centers of your brain; that's hard to fight.

My advice: try to do as many different things as possible. If you always have something cool and interesting to do, you'll be less tempted to idly browse the internettes.

 

Wake up. Turn on computer. (Although, it's usually just turn on monitor because my computer is on 24/7.)

 

Frankly I don't bother to limit or try not to limit my time spent on the internet. I use it as I need it or have nothing better to do. "Better" being relative.

Do I need to go to class? No internet (unless I bring my laptop and tether my phone to look up what teach there just said). Work? Unless I'm fixing a computer, no internet. Hanging out with friends? Unless I'm looking something up, no internet.

Computers and technology have provided me with what I'm pretty sure will be my college and career path. Do I wish I had spent more time with friends socializing? Perhaps but there is nothing I can do about the past, only the future. Most of my time spent on the internet is learning and I completely enjoy learning. Reading Wikipedia? Not because I'm bored but because I want to know more about the debt ceiling of the US in the last 200 years or because I want to know what the labor party of Britian has voted for/against in the last year. Never will I regard becoming knowledgeable about the world around me as a waste of time.

Now if I had spent the better part of my teenage years drunk/high doing nothing remotely productive on the internet beyond playing games then sure I'd feel like I had cheated myself.

Bit more to the point, I do limit myself from mindlessly checking my Facebook status while mid conversation as that is plain rude. I won't limit myself (such as the other week) from looking up movie information on Wikipedia while sitting in the back seat of a car with friends while driving to see the move I'm looking up. Or the other week I found a nearby sushi joint using Yelp on my phone. If my phone beeps letting me know I just got an e-mail depending on where I am and what I'm doing I'll check what it was and maybe glance at its contents - especially if I'm expecting an important e-mail.

So long as I don't suddenly suffer from withdrawal symptoms that appear to stem from not having a web browser in front of me I consider my usage healthy.