The year was 2008; I was in a cybercafé on Kinshasha Road, Ungwarimi, Kaduna. Plugged to my laptop then was a LAN switch and I was surfing at great speed. I had five Internet Explorer windows open and several tabs on each. An acquaintance of mine, well educated, walks into the café, stands over my shoulder for a while and then pops the question – What do you always do online? I tried to faintly explain to him but with the look of his face, I am not sure he properly understood me. It’s 2015 and I still hear people ask the same question in different ways. I still meet young people born in the 1980’s and 1990’s with barely functional email addresses or ones they can’t remember the password. The number is though on the decline. Their emails were probably opened to facilitate their registration on some social media platforms.
Like several other people who depend on the use of the internet for their livelihood, my system is rarely shut down. It’s almost permanently on a hibernating mode until a major update needs to be done or the window crashes due to some errors. If you are keen on seeing what your friends or relatives do online, all you need to check is their browsing history. With that, you get to see what they are fine with having searchable on their system. When they are online and want to view pages they do not want you to see, they open incognito pages and access the internet from there. To check the browsing history on a computer, the shortcut is pressing Control + H on the keyboard.
There are currently about 7.125 billion people in the world today and that population is estimated to grow to become 11 billion by 2100. Of the world’s present population, almost half of this population is on the internet. There are an estimated 3.17 billion people worldwide that have access to the internet. What people do online varies based on countries and locations. Because of the communication edge that social networks have, it is the major use to which the internet is put to. This means people get on various social media pages to update status, to like comments, to pin pictures, to double tap on pictures in the case of instagram. Social media spaces also allow people to keep in touch with one another and know what is happening.
Also on the burgeoning list of what people do online is emailing. Various forms of documents are sent through the internet especially work related documents. It is even possible for groups of people to edit a document together and collectively put finishing touches to it in real time. This for example is possible with the use of Google Docs while Dropbox and Google Drive can allow users send heavy attachments to others, an act that further makes the future of courier agencies bleaker. Searches are one of the most important things people engage in online. Except it is not online, anything and everything is available on the internet. There are currently about 4.73 billion pages available on the web today and it has made access to information better. With the use of bing.com by Microsoft or google.com by Google Incorporated, it is possible to have access to diverse forms of things. It will not be surprising if in the next decade we begin to meet people are totally home schooled simply through the use of the internet to gain access to educational resources. That is how rich the content of the internet has become. It is however left to the individual to comb through the content to differentiate between genuine contents and those otherwise. This is so because the internet largely does not discriminate. It accepts almost everything thrown at it.
It is not all about work on the internet, people also engage in various forms of leisure. There are video contents for entertainment purpose on the internet. The only thing that stands between a user and such content is data access and the internet’s bandwidth. Otherwise, it is possible to watch video on various issues and even movies that have been archived by various individuals in those spaces. There are also gaming rooms that people visit online and it makes it possible for them to play games with other virtual mates or play against the automated fittings already provided by the programmer.
Blogging is another big activity internet users engage in. Since there are always daily experiences, what people do is to share words, pictures and sometimes videos from these experiences on their blog(s) or on others as a guest blogger. The benefit here is that they have a permanent space they can archive information and they can also make the settings private or public based on the content. Blogging is one of the favoured uses to which the internet is put to because of the economic dimension to it. Blogs that can gather enough traffic enjoy advert patronage and then the blogger earns income that way.
Across the world today, there are online radios that people listen to for entertainment purposes and there are also online newspapers and magazines that people gain access to for information purpose. This piece for instance is available in print and on punchng.com therefore availing people across the world that can access materials written in English an opportunity to read it now or even several years later. The internet is also used today by people to search for addresses and directions to a place. It is one favoured use of the internet. In addition, there is the fast growing culture of e-commerce. Banking transactions are now very easy and safe even when done on the internet. People can now wire money across states and countries with the kind of ease that was only previously imagined. Also gaining momentum at a frightening pace especially in developing countries is buying and selling through online portals. It is the future and it explains why the success recorded in a short while is massive. I’ll compose thoughts on this later. Getting online is not a privilege, it should morph into a human right issue because of the several benefits available through such access. I hope we get to the point where legislations about access will be considered for the teeming population of young people in the country.
@SolaFagro on twitter
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‘Sola Fagorusi is a social entrepreneur and a prized freelance writer with a bias for youth and rural development. He started off as a youth staff with Action Health Incorporated in 2001. The Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife alumnus currently manages the programmes ofOneLife Initiative, Nigeria. ‘Sola is a DESPLAY Africa (Africa’s foremost and most consistent annual youth democracy academy) fellow and has been on its faculty since 2011. Keenly interested in governance and pan-Africanism, he volunteers as online editor of YouthHub Africa; a cyber-community for young Africans involved in social change. He believes in the efficacy of oratory and writing as tools to drive developmental engagements. As a freelance writer, he spares time to pen thoughts on contemporary societal issues and is a weekly columnist with Nigeria’s most read daily ? Punch Newspaper. His training and capacity cuts across democracy and governance, leadership, micro-enterprise, ICT4D, SRH, value chains, development communication and policy issues. He tweets @SolaFagro and blogs at www.kadunaboy.com
