My Most Recent Experiences with The Digital

Having started my blogs with my first ever encounter of a digital community, I figured that it would be nice to end with my most recent experience of the Digital in general. With the past two weeks have been an enormous rollercoaster, I think this is the perfect opportunity to look into both the positive and negative aspects of the Digital in my life.

What happened in the past weeks?

Being a second-year Japanstudies bachelor student, the last two weeks were crammed with paper deadlines, presentations, oral exams, and written exams. As if that doesn’t give enough stress, I also managed to get ill and accidentally drug myself with medicines (Instead of take 1 pill every 3 hours I read take 3 pills every 1 hour. I do not recommend trying this yourself, especially not while studying for your exams). Next to this I have to study but I feel like I am in no state to study stress, the second tight lockdown was announced. This cruelly crushed my last bit of motivation, namely a holiday filled with doing fun and relaxing stuff, and transformed it into a prospect of sitting inside for weeks yet again.

Everything combined….well I’ve been better…but that’s not the point right now! Let’s take a look at how the digital has influenced/helped me during these past two weeks.

Negative Aspects

I think that the biggest negative aspect of the digital can easily be called distraction. Now, I’m not the type to start an entire new Netflix series a few days before an exam or anything. When talking about distraction I mainly mean short distractions. The main culprits in this area are Wattpad and Tiktok. Wattpad is an app where people can write and share their own stories. I love reading romantic short-story fanfictions that are usually about 1000 to 3000 words long, and can thus be read within 10 minutes. Tiktok, which I have been using far too frequently ever since my Tiktok blog, is an app where people can watch short videos of their interests.

I don’t know how many times I caught myself telling myself ‘just one more story’ or ‘just five more minutes of Tiktok’. Those small amounts of time feel like nothing, I mean, studying from 15:30 till 17:30 or studying from 15:40 till 17:30, that doesn’t make a real difference. However, once you keep telling yourself that the next 5 minutes won’t make a difference, again and again, and again, then the problem starts. Before you know it’s 17:00 and you haven’t done a thing.

Positive Aspects

But of course, the digital is not all despair and distraction. When focusing on the more positive aspects of the digital, two apps come forward as well. One is Spotify, an app that can be used for listening to music. For me, studying while listening to music really helps to keep me focused. Because Spotify has such a large collection of songs, there is always one to fit my mood. When I am feeling super motivated, I play fast uplifting songs and when I am more tired but still wanna get some work done, I switch to relatively calmer songs. The second app is actually Whatsapp. Many probably see Whatsapp as a great distraction as well, but I found that it actually helped me. As one could read at the beginning of this blog, it was evident that I didn’t feel too great during the last two weeks. One thing that helped me was just talking about it with friends. Yea, they also felt frustrated about the lockdown situation. Yes, they were also stressed about that upcoming test. Some even offered advice on how to feel better. Many times, after having such conversations, I kinda felt revitalized and it helped me a lot to just keep my motivation alive.

Conclusion

Concluding, I think that, when handled with caution, any digital media platform could help you a lot when you are busy or having a hard time. Just try not to overuse it, or you will find yourself spending much more time on it than you had wished, and you end up having a harder time than you had before.

Side Note: While writing this blog post I have….

  • Read 3 Wattpad stories
  • Watched 1 Youtube Video
  • Been on Tiktok for at least 10 minutes

Maybe I should start listening to my own advice for once….