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What do people do online?


FlyJ

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The year was 2008. I was at a cybercafé on Kinshasha Road, Ungwarimi, Kaduna. Plugged to my laptop then was a LAN switch, and I was surfing at a great speed. I had five Internet Explorer windows open and several tabs on each.

 

An acquaintance of mine, well educated, walked into the café and stood over my shoulder for a while and then asked, “What do you always do online?” I tried to explain to him, but his countenance showed that he did not understand me.

 

It is 2015, I still hear people ask the same question in different ways. I still meet people born in the 1980s and 1990s with barely functional email addresses or ones whose passwords they cannot remember – the number is though on the decline. Their emails are probably opened to facilitate registration on some social media platforms.

 

Like several other people who depend on the use of the Internet for their livelihood, my system is rarely shut down. It is almost permanently on a hibernating mode until a major update needs to be done or the window crashes due to some errors. If you are keen on seeing what your friends or relatives do online, all you need to check is their browsing history.

 

With that, you get to see what they search on their systems. When they are online and want to view pages they do not want you to see, they open Incognito pages and access the Internet from there. To check the browsing history on a computer, the shortcut is pressing Control + H on the keyboard.

 

There are about 7.125 billion people in the world today and that population is estimated to hit 11 billion by 2100. The fact, however, is that almost half of the population is on the Internet. There are an estimated ***.17 billion people worldwide that have access to it. Yet, what people do online varies based on countries and locations.

 

Because of the communication edge of social networks, they constitute a large percentage of Internet activities. People get on various social media pages to update status, comment, pin pictures and double-tap on pictures in the case of Instagram. Social media spaces also allow people to keep in touch with one another and know what is happening.

 

Also on the burgeoning list of what people do online is emailing. Various forms of documents are sent through the Internet, especially work-related documents. It is even possible for groups of people to edit a document together and collectively online. This, for example, is possible with the use of Google Docs while Dropbox and Google Drive can allow users to send heavy attachments to others, an act that further makes the future of courier agencies bleaker.

 

Searches are one of the most important things people engage in online. Unless it is not online, anything and everything is available on the Internet. There are currently about 4.73 billion pages available on the web, increasing access to information. With the use of bing.com by Microsoft or google.com by Google Incorporated, it is possible to have access to diverse things.

 

It will not be surprising if in the next decade we begin to meet people that school from their homes simply through the use of the Internet. That is how rich the content of the Internet has become. It is, however, left to individuals to comb through the content to differentiate between genuine content and otherwise. This is so because the Internet does not discriminate. It accepts almost everything thrown at it.

 

But people also engage in various forms of leisure on the Internet. There are videos for entertainment purposes; the only thing that stands between a user and such content is data access and the bandwidth. Otherwise, it is possible to watch video on various issues and even movies that have been archived by various individuals in those spaces. There are also gaming rooms that people visit, making it possible for them to play games with other virtual mates or play against the automated fittings provided by the programmer.

 

Blogging is another big activity Internet users engage in. Since there are always daily experiences, what people do is to share words, pictures and sometimes videos from these experiences on their blog(s). The benefit here is that they have a permanent space they can archive information and they can make the settings private or public based on the content. Blogs that can gather enough traffic enjoy advert patronage, giving the blogger a great opportunity.

 

Across the world today, there are online radios that people listen to for entertainment purposes. There are also online newspapers and magazines that people gain access to. This piece, for instance, is available in print and on punchng.com, thus availing people across the world access to the material now or even years later.

 

The Internet is also used today by people to search for addresses and directions to places. In addition, there is the fast growing e-commerce culture.

 

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