(Continuously Updated)
Those who have claimed the Internet to be the new Wild West had the right idea. Sure, it has been cleaned up and the law of the digital land is no longer lawlessness, but I’d say it is far from being a simplified service. It is an entire universe of information that we nonchalantly browse from the home or library or local coffee shop. Pretty much anywhere that expounds the blessings of fast Wi-Fi.
The Internet is also a tricky thing to master. Anyone with consciousness can access it to the point that it’s easier to log in than it is to stand up. But as your favorite barista might agree with, the internet like brewing coffee is easy to get going with and hard to master. After countless hours of slaving away at the upper level Mobile and Embedded Systems course, the greatest accomplishment I feel is a refined ability to Google nearly everything. It is a skill to know how to type into that little search bar, but an art to know at what point to stop and ask the professor.
This is a guide of knowledge and wisdom I’ve been forced to gather as a student and growing person. It’s been over 10 years since the iPhone came out. I like to think I’ve grown in size and refined my style in the same manner it has. I also like to think I’ve used one (an iPhone) and the internet enough to be well versed in the ins and outs of use. Some of these tips are big and long winded. Some are small and simple. They all aim to refine your ability to use the internet as a tool, rather than the other way around. Let’s get to it!
Control Social Media
Say it with me: “I compulsively use social media.” Excellent!
You are the captain, not it. I feel no more social as a result of social media except that I can now know what stirs the bowels of celebrities across the globe. Also, I know now which friends I should avoid telling secrets to. (Hint: it’s the one’s who share the most of those viral videos and memes.) People are different, so this is not about removing yourself from most social media platforms (although that is the approach that worked best for me). Rather, this is to discern what is most important and valuable to you, and whether certain apps or websites have more negatives than positives in your life.
For example, I will use my relationship with Facebook. I had a Facebook since my younger years, and would post in it and share photos frequently. I could see what my friends were up to, and in a way stay connected in their lives. Because growing up I moved every few years, Facebook became an invaluable tool for connecting with old friends across the globe. I would feel that I spent too much time on it, but keep the service around because of these connections that could only be easily maintained through Facebook. In the middle of my time in college though I recognized that it became a bit of a reflex to pop open my laptop, click on the web bar, and type “f-ENTER”, letting auto-fill direct me to Facebook easier than getting annoyed at a buzzing fly. In parallel with this, I became more aware of some of the detrimental affects social media like Facebook had on society. I felt that I needed to limit my consumption not just for myself but to outwardly express my beliefs. So over time I found a balance point between the good invaluable services Facebook provided with the addictive and negative nature I ascribed to it.
I changed my password to something ridiculously long, wrote it down and stored it, then cleared my browsers of any auto-filled passwords for Facebook. I then disabled (not deleted) my account. I don’t think they want you to go and give you a full guilt trip of questions and well chosen pictures of friends to remind you of their services to you. Ignore them like sirens, and power through to the end. When prompted for why I was disabling, they don’t have a button for “I think your service does more bad for my life than good”, so I clicked whatever. And that was that.
Disabling is great because it leaves your account intact should you need to use Facebook in some sparing moment in the future. Messenger is also separate from Facebook, so I can still message friends through that service as if I had a Facebook without needing the actual main platform.
Figuring out the balance that works for you can take some time or it can be quick. The more you bring it under your control the more you will benefit. The biggest way will be in time. For all the talk of never having enough time in the day, many of us waste huge percentages of it on social media. If you control social media you will be able to use it at maximum 30 minutes a day each day. More reasonably it would be an intermittent use only when real needs arise, like posting an event. Less tangibly, I’ve found stepping back from social media has reduced my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Without the constant stream of people doing things with their lives that seem cooler than mine, I don’t feel as much pressure to be a part of those events, and also have more time to actually live my own life. You can’t get much better than that.
Passwords: Anything but Short and Sweet
This is probably something most people have heard constantly over time, but this might help with remembering passwords that are secure. Use derivatives of phrases like “EveryGoodBoyDeservesFudge” (don’t literally use that one) that can be memorable for you and also long. If I’m stealing your password, there’s two options. You either give it to me via a phishing website or some other form, or I guess well. For the latter, that can be from automated systems trying to crack the service. The number of password possibilities scales exponentially with the length, so if your password is 7 characters, there is around 26^7 possibilities, and if it is 17 characters there are 26^17 possibilities. That translates between taking minutes to scan through all possible passwords you could have, and years.
You’ll still inevitably create too many accounts with too many different passwords, and for that use a keychain. A keychain is literally what it sounds like, a place to put all your keys (passwords) so you can easily unlock any door you need access to (your accounts). I use Firefox and save my passwords to their keychain. If I need to access a site that I’ve saved, I can look up my password on their keychain directory and use it to log in. It’s probably the safest way to keep things together and locked down, since without a keychain you are more likely to only use a few passwords and have all your accounts compromised if one is.
Make Good Searches
In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought thinks for millions of years to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, before coming up with the answer “42.” But it doesn’t know the question it answered. It needs an even bigger super computer to do that computation.
While answers on the Internet are a dime a dozen, it can be difficult getting the right ones. An unfortunate side effect of the pseudo-democratic way the internet functions is that it can be easy to get the wrong answer, or answers that are not credible. It used to be a bit of a joke: “Well, I heard it on the Internet!”, “Oh, the internet? Well then it has to be true!” The time to joke is past! We need answers to life’s pressing questions, and we need them now. Finding answers through search engines needs to be streamlined so you can get the answers you need. My solution isn’t a quick fix, but it nudges the discerning searcher in the right direction.
First, don’t ignore the “most recent” sorting filter. It can be invaluable when things change quickly. For example, I was in a class where we needed to work on programming pieces of the Linux Kernel (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is). There was so much information to learn, that our professor essentially tasked us with figuring it out on our own. So out to Google we went in search of the information needed to learn about the kernel. Pretty soon I got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, and how so many different conflict statements existed on different websites. I felt like I was stuck in a loop of confusion, going on for ever and ever. Then one of my classmates said to try sorting by “most recent”. Once I did so I realized that much of the conflict information was from a period before a major update to the Kernel, and so I could use the information in more recent webpages to begin working on the assignment.
Treat Googling like a sport or a serious hobby. Tiger parents should stop forcing their kids to learn how to play the piano like little savants and make them learn how to find anything on the internet in 5 minutes flat. Getting good at Googling (or Binging if you do that) can happen, and if you’re old you are far from irredeemable. By searching everything you can start getting a sense for the reputable website for different genres of information, how to quickly dive into a large text to get answers out of it, and ways that you can fail at getting to an answer fast. For quick fact checking like “How old is Abraham Lincoln”, there shouldn’t be any learning curve. But for more complex questions like “How to resolve error code 0x1958f390 on Windows 10 PC Intel i7” where honestly you have no clue about anything at all and you are just trying to get your computer back in working order to submit an assignment due soon, you can be saved by a searching finesse. That’ll come with time and discerning the art of Googling.
De-Notify
Detox your mind of notifications, then reintroduce only the ones that are necessary. If you absolutely cannot cut them off completely for work or life related reasons, rigidly enforce limiting notifications to those important ones.
Notifications can feel like Pavlovian rewards systems. They will *bing!* oh sorry let me check that…. They will *bing!* distract *bing!* you *bing!* to no *bing!* end. And they don’t help your focus. Because many apps and services have found efficient ways to link rewards in the forms of likes and exciting news to notifications, we can find ourselves itching to check them as soon as they come in. Disable notifications for all apps, and then reenable only the ones that are really necessary. Not just interesting or cool, but necessary. Considering the power our little devices hold on our individual minds, it is important that we self-regulate consumption. Your smartphone should be a tool to augment the life that world otherwise exist without it. Again, it is about controlling your smartphone rather than having the people who build the apps and the phone controlling you. In another way, recognize that musicians have the freedom to create incredible music because they focus on developing their music skills and limit their involvement in other things like ballet or medicine. By limiting notifications and detaching your mind from your smartphone, you have more freedom to think deeply and exist in the world around you. Heck, you might recapture the freedom to strike up cool conversations with strangers instead of checking your mail.
Delete Your Apps
The digital hoarder is the person who thinks they have unlimited space to keep every app and piece of information they encounter ever on their phone to be used some time in the future. Their phone might never have enough space, no matter how large it is. Every page of apps is filled, plus folders for more. Whether you are a minimalist or app hoarder, cleaning through your apps every so often can leave your mind less cluttered.
On my iPhone I will clean and organize every once in a while and in between let things get a bit messy. When I organize, I look through my apps and figure out which ones I haven’t used in a while. Ignoring the gremlins in my head that scream “but you might want that app at some point soon in the future!!” I delete them with little remorse. If they become necessary in the future I can always redownload. Once I’ve purged the straggler apps, I organize the other apps. I don’t like folders so I only use them for the apps that I still use sparingly but keep around like some of the Apple apps you cannot remove download. I will try to limit my apps to the top 3 rows of each page so I can quickly glance through each page without much searching. Apps that I use constantly like Safari, Messages, Calendar, and a news snippet app will go in the main dock so I can always get to them. From there, apps are grouped by function like money stuff, reading stuff, school stuff, fun stuff, and so on and so on. Over time I break all these rules and chaos begins to creep in as I download and shuffle new apps. Then the cycle repeats itself and I clean things up once again.