this blog, procrastination, "vlogging"

This past week has been a ridiculous affair for me as I've been scrambling to get all my final papers in and studying for finals. The internet has not been helpful at all, and this blog has definitely been a procrastination tool for me.

It's funny that this blog is simultaneously class-related "work" and also one of my main sources of procrastination. This past semester, whenever I am not in the mood to study or am simply in a procrastinating mode, my tools for procrastination have been the following, in this order:

1. Email
2. Xanga
3. Facebook
4. This blog
5. Our wiki
6. Youtube
7. Newspaper sites

Over the last week, the habit of going down this list has been exacerbated ten-fold. Instead of doing the rounds every three hours, I have been checking up these sites every half an hour--definitely obsessive and unhealthy behavior. And the reason I check specifically these sites is because they are constantly being updated, so there's always new information to be read. I often wonder what students did to procrastinate before the internet was invented. What did they do in their rooms when they were feeling particularly lazy or unmotivated? It's interesting to note that for the last week, this blog's entries have mainly been random news, musing, and reflections rather than any kind of structured response to readings. Well, this partly has to do with the fact that we don't have readings for the week, but I also see it as a procrastination thing, where we share the latest thing that procrastination has led us to read.

My friend who's a media studies major also recently informed me about the popularity of "vlogging." I didn't realize this until I started thinking about all my friends' blogs and their recent posts. I have a network of friends who keep blogs and I've been in it for about three years, and in the last semester, I've noticed that many people have started "vlogging," that is they merely post a link to a youtube video or some other funny and silly video site. This evolution from text-based to image-based to video-based blogging has been really cool and it's interesting for me to see the evolution of it over the years first-hand. The most striking thing that I'll note, however, is that we so easily adjust to new forms of media and new forms of media are naturalized so quickly for us, that sometimes we don't even realize the transitions that are taking place online and right in front of our eyes. I didn't realize these shifts from text to image to video until a friend specifically mentioned it to me, and then it all clicked for me. It's amazing and scary how quickly we adapt to our new environments and changes in the online world without even knowing and realizing it.

So, to continue with this entry's topic of procrastination and vlogging, I end with this: llama duck