After realizing
that I use the same browser at all times, I wanted to challenge myself. After
tracking myself in October and going through my data, I wanted to find out what
would happen if 'the bookmarks' were taken away from me. My systematic use of
bookmarks is so significant that a breaching experiment is only natural in
order to find out what I will be missing
when this systematic order is broken.
I decided
to do the experiment as I turned on my desktop computer for the first time that day, since the pattern of going through the bookmarks
is most significant whenever turning on my computer for the first time on any
given day (I noted this from my social media tracking in October). The first
thing I did was in fact to click on the Mozilla Firefox icon – and I didn't
realize it until the browser window had opened. I then realized how natural and
derived from habit the use of a specific browser is. I then opened another browser
(Chrome) and literally didn't know what to do. The Chrome browser window seems amazingly empty in comparison to my preferred browser's window – so I didn't actually
know where to begin. I usually go to the Bookmarks Toolbar in order to pull up
the first of a row of social media; the first being Facebook. All of the
sudden, I didn't have this Bookmarks Toolbar to turn to, which led me to
thinking that I needed to go to the other bookmarks stored in the right-hand
side of the browser. But of course no bookmarks were stored, since I never use
the Chrome browser. Even though I knew that
no bookmarks were stored, I still went to see if this could be true. I knew
about this, and yet I went to check just to be safe. No bookmarks, no short
cuts.
And this is
where I got irritated. I thought to myself: "This is stupid. When I have
the possibility to actually store bookmarks in order to not remember what is redundant to remember, why even consider using
a browser with no stored bookmarks?" The experiment seemed pointless – and
yet I already had provoked emotions just by changing the way I enter the
internet. I changed the course of which I normally navigate to and around the internet
and already I had gotten a reaction; a clear irritation, a clear frustration.
I actually ended
up not even trying to remember the usual order of social media visited. I went
to Facebook but as soon as I had to login to my account, I gave up and went on
to Twitter, but here it was the same problem; I had to login – and just by knowing that I was already logged in
within the other browser, this made no sense to me. It was so inconvenient, I
would even say asinine to go through all this trouble, when I could handle it
all a lot smoother just by clicking the icon I usually do.
