The internet

Q: What do you use the internet for? A: Mostly work and staying in touch with people, if I'm honest — email, messages, video calls with family who live a long way off. Beyond that it's become the default place I go when I want to know something, which is a bit different from how I used it ten years ago. I still read the news there too, though I've started to trust it less than I used to. Q: How many hours a day are you online? A: More than I'd like to admit, probably six or seven hours if you count work. It creeps up on you — you open one tab to check something quickly and forty minutes later you're still there. I've tried tracking it with an app a couple of times, and the number is always higher than what I would have guessed. Q: Do you trust what you read online? A: Not automatically, no. I've learned to be a bit more sceptical, especially with anything that seems designed to provoke a reaction rather than inform. If something matters, I'll usually check it against two or three sources before I actually believe it, which sounds exhausting when I say it out loud, but it's become fairly automatic. Q: How was life different before it? A: I'm just old enough to remember a version of life before it took over everything — you'd plan things in advance and stick to the plan, because there was no way to check in halfway through. Information took longer to find, but somehow that made you more careful about what you actually went looking for. I don't think it was better exactly, just slower, and there's something to be said for that.