In haven’t realized how much time I actually spend in front of the computer until I kept track of it. Especially the time before Christmas (Thursday the 10th – Monday 14th) was quite busy. In average I spent more than 9 hours in front of my laptop. I was writing on essays, mainly using Word, pdf texts and and online dictionary.
When I have internet access I spend about 30mins to read or browse through online newspapers and I check my emails about 2 or 3 times per day. I also have to say that even though I rejected it at first, I became a regular but, I would say, rather passive FaceBook user which takes another 10 to 30min daily.
I also have been without a TV for the last couple of years and at the moment I rarely watch any movies rather more TV series which during the week does not take more than 2 or 3 hours altogether. About 2 or 3 times a week, mostly if I don’t have anything else to do I watch the news online. The time I spend watching things does not increase much during the weekend. The weekend of the 13th/14th of December was a huge exception when I spend about 13 hours (also Friday and Thursday) on the computer doing assignments and research. I mainly used word, google and online dictionaries, with checking my mails as distraction every once in a while. I can say that it was one of the most exhausting weekends I had so far.
It also became a frequent habit to turn on the computer every morning and check my emails or read the news if I have time before leaving the house. In general my laptop is the main source of media which I use. I have a bunch of books I want/have to read but depending on how I feel I can spend about 30min to a few hours reading in them. My mobile phone is too old to do much with it and it mainly serves the purpose as my alarm clock.
A big contrast to my usual habits have been the last 3 weeks over Christmas and New Year, the time I spend in Germany, and which I regarded as really refreshing because I hardly had any internet access, hence using my computer which I have with me became more or less useless. I don’t have any movies or games on it and the only times I used it was when I wanted to listen to music. The refreshing thing is that without internet I don’t have the urge to check emails and FB, only did it once a week when I had the possibility. And if I had internet access as during the last 3 days I did not feel like using it for anything else than former. During the last weeks, my media use was restricted to an estimated 6 hours of TV (news and movies) weekly and reading newspapers and magazines. Also my mobile phone was broken so one could say that for 2 weeks I was pretty much “unplugged” from any new media and I must say I really enjoyed it having plenty of time for reading books and magazines and I also listened to the radio about 2 hours daily which I don’t usually do.
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It's so refreshing to read that there is someone else here who actually regularly follows the news. I've met surprisingly many people approximately at our age who say that they are not interested in news and current developments in the world at the slightest extent. I also read news from the online newspapers every day and already have getting used to thinking about myself as a kind of oddball because of that :)
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