My online behaviour

[This is a post I made to the IMS forum on the CEMP website following on from a lecture on online behaviour]

So what have I been doing online this week?

Well, for a start, Sunday seems to be the day that I spend the longest continual time on the internet, so apologies I am only just getting round to posting now. I have to say that perhaps the time I spend on the internet has slightly decreased this year, at least for personal surfing. I seem to spend more time now using the online databases for looking up journals etc and even when I do find a journal I want to read, I will almost always opt to print it out instead of read it on the computer screen.

Although I seem to go online mainly for uni research purposes, I will go through the same sort of routine before getting to what I actually intended to do. This basically includes checking my two email accounts - hotmail and the uni one - which is really the main personal purpose I have for the net. I used to always automatically log in to messenger when my computer started but I changed this as I found it caused too much distraction and although I quite enjoy talking online, it would take up soooo much time.

I have recently joined a whole load of social networking sites, which has been prompted by the 'course requirements'. I don't think I would have landed at the sites otherwise unless perhaps recommended by friends (WOM again). 3 of my housemates are currently obsessed with Facebook and have used the words 'I'm addicted' when refering to it. I have joined Facebook and yeh, it's interesting but I do find it odd that you have to send out requests to get people to be your 'friend'. I also struggle with the fact that mostly people's friend on there are people you see every day - so why not just ask them something face to face instead of posting comments? Whatever happened to conversation? Oh, also someone who has the same name as me asked me to be thier friend, which I found a little odd.

Another thing that has annoyed me lately is the number of passwords I have to remember as a result of being on all these various sites. The number of times I have had to send requests asking the sites to re-send my password is just getting annoying. But then, I also think that if write them down somewhere then someone else could get hold of them, log in and vandalise my spaces! Perhaps a little cynical?! With these kind of sites as well, I find that mostly people from school contact you, and it's usually all the people you don't really want to talk and I wonder if they do it just so they can say 'I now have 56 friends on myspace'. Does it make people feel better to have this kind of benchmark?

I do use online banking quite a lot and probably check my accounts once a week online. I find the service pretty good and trust that all the reporting is correct. This service is really useful to me and I am more than happy to pay bills online etc. Although saying that I tried to renew my car tax online this week and after trying three times and getting a 'technical fault' message, I had to revert to calling up the automated telephone service which for some reason I am more dubious about when giving card details etc.

In conclusion, I really only use the internet for communication purposes and have been known to download the odd music track for free. I am comfortable using the internet for services such as banking or buying insurance and will occasionally shop online for clothes or shoes.