Online is the new reality

It’s midnight, and instead of sleeping, I sometimes find myself clutching my iPhone and refreshing my Twitter feed every 20 seconds or so. It’s safe to say that the internet and social networking has taken over my life. I’m an addict.

Social Networking is something that all of us are highly aware of, and the majority will admit to being addicted. It seems in this day and age we thrive off ‘liking’ people’s life updates, ‘retweeting’ something funny and ‘poking’ people we fancy. 10 years ago that would have seemed a little bit zany, but it’s become a part of everyday life.

In fact, it’s hard to think back to a time when growing up was spent reading books and having to walk halfway across town to communicate with friends. It was easy at the time, but looking back it seems like an extremely difficult scenario.

These days we can do shopping, order pizza, read a book, find out the latest news and access multiple web pages all from our mobile phones! We don’t even need to open our laptops up much anymore. ‘Apps’ on our phones allow us to do and access so much in our daily lives, and honestly myself, and many others would admit to never being able to go back to life without them. When I was growing up, if I wanted to get hold of a song that had been stuck in my head for days, I’d usually wait for Sunday when the UK Top 40 would play it, which resulted in me waiting for that moment to click ‘record’ on a tape! But these days, all I’d have to do is log on to my iTunes account from my phone and download it in seconds. It’s a tad more convenient.

Internet addict, Jessica Harries says “I check my phone when I’m in work every half an hour and I’m constantly on it from the minute I finish. I spend a good 6-8 hours on social networking sites, mainly on my phone as the apps are more convenient and easier to use. My favourite apps are probably convenient ones like Odeon, internet banking, Spotify, Instagram and Amazon. I do wish that I didn’t spend so much time social networking but with some friends it’s the only form of contact!”

But it seems that there is way more than just that that’s rubbed off on our daily lives. ‘Internet Lingo’ has become a totes essensh way of communicating with our BFF’s. What I’m trying to say is that ‘txt spk’ or even ‘tweet speak’ has become something of an extreme habit that a lot of us find hard to break. Words like ‘amazeballs’ and ’emosh’ have found themselves escaping from our mouths before we even have time to realise that we’re speaking like a cast member of ‘TOWIE’ even though we promised ourselves we’d never let ourselves sound that ridiculous.

But before we even begin to plot our escape from this modern day language, we might want to start accepting it because words such as ‘LOLZ’, ‘lollage’ and ‘amazeballs’ have found a home in the online Collins dictionary. I’m totes being serious.

So it’s offish, the internet has us well and truly changed, but maybe it’s not a bad thing after all. Without the internet we wouldn’t be able to keep up to date with world news, study information for crucial projects and we would definitely not be able to watch those funny animal videos on YouTube. Whatever it is that floats your boat, the internet will have it for you. But be careful, because before you know it, you’ll be totes addicted.

BRB.

Josh!