Internet

The Google Chromebook, despite its fairly abysmal reviews and sales, sought to create a laptop centered entirely around the web. The laptop runs an operating system that works under a different modus operandi compared to your run-of-the-mill computer, in that most of the laptop functions are ran from within the Chrome web browser.

Instead of your conventional Microsoft Word, you use Google Documents. Image editing is done via Picasa. Movies are watched on Netflix and various other streaming sites. Music is accessed through services like Pandora or Google Play Music. Files are stored on Google Drive. The list goes on.

The fact that Google produced this particular laptop stands as a testament for technological shift from regular conventional applications to web-based applications. Many of the tasks that are normally ran through an operating system can now be micro-managed into a web browser, indicating that web technology now encompasses many of our modern computational needs.

This and many other examples come to reveal that internet technology is slowly replacing many of our daily tasks. As a result, I personally feel that labeling too much time on the "internet" is something that quite simply doesn't mean anything. It could mean shopping, gaming, watching movies, reading books, researching data, conducting experiments, socializing with others, writing a diary, visiting foreign locations, learning a new language, composing new music, and millions of other tasks.

For example, if I said I spent five hours on the internet yesterday that could mean that I watched a two hour film, spent an hour writing an essay, listened to jazz while reading the news for half an hour, chat with friends on Facebook for half an hour, watch a half-hour lecture on differential calculus, and spent another half-hour reading a classic novel off of Project Gutenberg.

Does that sound like an obscene waste of time? Sure, it was time-consuming. But is it fair to label it as a "time-consuming habit" or an addiction? I'd like to challenge the nature of the question by establishing the whole internet as simply too big of a medium to make that type of generalization.

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing the amount of time I spend browsing entirely irrelevant articles on Wikipedia.

Who knows.