How many hours a day do you spend online?
If you’re anything like myself, there’s probably hardly a moment during your day without being connected to the ever-buzzing, vibrant, notoriously egalitarian network that is the Internet. From googling film ratings (holy cow, Zootopia is 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, who knew) and random New York Times articles (yes, we all get it, Trump is a menace, bet all of you would want to get back to monarchy now, huh?) to scrolling through gorgeous recipes far beyond your culinary skills (thanks Proper Tasty, I’m drooling now), Internet activity has become a part of life just as mundane and universal as brushing your teeth in the morning: it’s there and you do it and if you don’t, you feel slightly guilty and icky the entire day until you catch up. According to the Telegraph’s report in 2015, in the last decade the time we spend online increased almost threefold: from weekly 10h 24min to 27h 36min. That amounts to nearly four hours a day, all week, plastered to the screen.
It probably looks less alarming than you had expected, given that you most likely check emails and Facebook on your phone at various times during the day – and assuming that you get a healthy amount of 8h of sleep per night, it is still a measly 1/4 of your time, leaving plenty of space for other activities. But even with that, a weekly sum of 27h 36min is somewhat chilling: it is about three times the span of all my contact hours during an average Oxford week. Which means that for every hour I spend with my tutor or lecturer, I have three glued to the laptop.
Which is fine, right? When you make a comparison like this, you may only imagine the copious amounts of study that are going on based on my tutor’s input. – Yes, and all students know how that goes: you sit down to write an essay, and then emerge eight hours later with about 300 words of introduction and a surprisingly deep knowledge about professional kite-flying.
Essentially, what is happening is we spend the time idly browsing through the web whilst wallowing in slowly sharpening sense of guilt. The internet has made the art of procrastination maddeningly easy; and thus we are wasting away our stress-free existence one click at a time. Let’s not lie to ourselves: many of us spend way more than four hours a day in front of the screen, and on what is definitely not work. Instead of doing our assignments productively, we ruin our attention span by feeding our brains the Buzzfeed articles, flashy cat videos, and random quizzes which are obviously nonsense because of all Harry Potter characters, I am obviously Hermione, not Hagrid. This is as much a fact of student life as the artery-clogging midnight snack at a kebab van, and there is hardly anything one can do about it except giving their gravely acknowledgment. It is just the term reality, and it takes its toll.
But it’s not term time anymore. It’s Easter vacation, and most of us are now blissfully forgetful of the Oxford lifestyle.
Are you really, though?
At home, when the relentless flow of challenges, experiences, deadlines, and stress subsides, you might find yourself falling back on the familiar procrastination habits – bombarding your brain with information, scrolling through Facebook to keep track on the events you’re missing, keeping in touch with people you’ve left. The momentum is still there, it’s been a rough fast ride, and your mind is still racing, still craving more input, more to satiate that hunger for short, easily processed information.
Turn it off.
Give your friends a quick heads-up that you’re going to be away, leave an automatic reply on your Oxford email if your tutors try to contact you, and get offline.
You’re going to be reeling for a while: what exactly do I do without Facebook, without Instagram, Twitter, external validation, constant connection?
I, for example, painted a Japanese-style landscape.
It used to be that outlet of mine, painting. I don’t really do it at Oxford, I’m not really sure why – I could if I put my mind to it, I just don’t. I don’t really pick up a book for fun either. My home has a rule that if you have a book on your shelf, it’s a disgrace if you haven’t read it; it used to be a commandment of mine. Now I’m glad that I’m more or less managing to get through one particular section I need for the essay. I never sew here either, I get annoyed if I don’t see the results quick enough, and with sewing you never do.
What is your thing that you give up for term time?
Drowning in the internet is easy. It’s the mental equivalent of junk food, providing you with empty entertainment without any actual growth. A day, three days, a week without the internet – however much you’re willing to try – is a detox for that. By being away from the instant source of cheap fun, you try to figure out what made you happy when you actually had to make an effort. You’re forced to get out. Pick up a book. Get some sleep. Plan something. Figure out how to make yourself entertained by working on it. And when you get back to the internet, you’ll be surprised how different it suddenly appears: instead of quicksand, a tool you can control.
So reclaim those four hours a day. They are yours to spend and for a month, there is no Oxford tutor telling you what to do with your time. Relax, take a deep breath, put the strain of the term behind you, and just turn it off.
