We’ve all been in the embarrassing situation.
Having to sit through a conversation where you know absolutely nothing about the topic is probably one of the most awkward experiences a person can go through. While everyone seems to have fun discussing their greatly diversified opinions on the subject, your inability to participate forces you to sit quietly, twiddling your thumbs, struggling to stay awake or having an even more interesting debate in your head about which person you would eat first if everyone in the room were trapped in the mountains during a blizzard.
You always have the option of trying to awkwardly pass off as uninterested in such meager conversations, or you can use one of mankind’s best creations: the Internet. A quick series of taps on a smartphone can hook you up to unlimited knowledge about anything and everything and can prevent a situation in which you aren’t the intelligent one.
The Internet is one of my best friends. I can’t thank it enough for the countless times it has helped me finish a project, complete research reports that my grade depended on or helped me understand math. If the Internet wasn’t around, I would be a far worse student than I really am.
But, it doesn’t only help me out in my schoolwork.
The Internet is one of the best entertainment options a teenager has. As long as you stay within the area of a little something called legality, the possibilities are endless.
In my case, having AUT at the very end of the day means that my attention span has gone home for the day. So my friends and I have waste several hours of precious AUT time searching our names on Google, stalking random people on Twitter that just so happen to come up in our conversations and then laughing our heads off while scrolling through comical Pinterest content.
Even though many people claim technology has ruined the minds of this generation, I like to think that we have access to more information than the generations before us. We have the ability to pull up any fact about any subject at any time. For us, entertainment is a few screen-taps away.
I’ll admit, I don’t know how I would live without the Internet. Life as we know it is built upon this technological blessing, but we never really acknowledge it as a necessity. Instead, we take it for granted.
By Afsah Khan