Читать книгу Overcoming Internet Addiction For Dummies - David N. Greenfield - Страница 16

Consuming audio and video content (including music, podcasts, and audiobooks) has become commonplace; in fact, most of what you consume in terms of music, TV, movies, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, podcasts, YouTube, Kindle, and so on is essentially in streaming format. Even software is streamed or downloaded, and your data is increasingly held in the cloud (on a company’s server) instead of on your devices. Streaming means that information and content is pushed to your device in real time, and you watch, read, or listen to it as it is streamed. Sometimes you can download it onto your device and store it for later use.

Although no one would argue against the convenience of consuming your digital entertainment in this manner, there are some inherent problems. One major problem is that many of these streaming sites have default settings, called autoplay, for audio or video content to keep going to the next movie, TV show, podcast, or YouTube clip — unless you deliberately turn off that feature. The net effect (no pun intended) is that you can end up watching or listening to a lot more content than you intended to or have time for. The automatic “pushed” nature of the content is equivalent to eating out of a large dish with no ability to measure the portion of food (or digital content) you are consuming. See Chapter 6 for more about streaming content.