When looking around a lecture hall, you can usually spot as many people surfing the internet as those paying attention to what the professor is saying. While the usual favorite sites are Facebook.com or Michigan websites like CTools, a new crop of entertainment websites have increased in popularity. Sites like textsfromlastnight.com, fmylife.com, mylifeisaverage.com, mylifeisbro.com, funnyordie.com, and rottentomatoes.com are quickly gaining notoriety in the field of classroom distractions.

Entertainment/Distraction

While not all these websites are used by students during class, they’re all entertaining or useful. Almost everyone has heard of textsfromlastnight.com, an incredibly funny and entertaining website, at this point. Users can guess the context of the site from the address – a literal compilation of texts from last night put on a website for entertainment. Texts must be approved by the creators, who will only post the texts they find most entertaining. Texts are completely uncensored, however, and almost anything is fair game.  Identities are kept private by only listing the area code of the phone used rather than the entire phone number. Users can also provide input on the messages by voting on whether they feel this person had a “good” or “bad” night. Users can narrow their search by looking through texts based off area code, or whether they’d rather read about “good” or “bad” nights. Overall, the website is hilarious and provides a great distraction as well as entertainment.  SHEI’s Kevin Binder even begins each of his “Insights to the Male Mind” segments with a text from last night relating to the topic of discussion.

Two other entertaining websites where people can post their thoughts are fmylife.com and mylifeisaverage.com. On fmylife.com, users can post any type of thought or story in which things do not exactly go their way – hence the need to post it on “F” my life. As with textsfromlastnight, users can sort through the posts by recency, “top fml’s”, or “random fml’s”. Unfortunately, fmylife.com seems to have hit its peak and be in a decline of popularity. It spawned many other websites, however, with mylifeisaverage.com just being one example of many. Mylifeisaverage.com is very similar to fmylife.com, except the posts typically deal with topics like Harry Potter, light sabers, ninjas, etc.

Mylifeisbro.com is also similar in that it is open to the public to post any anecdotes they find relevant to the site, but this website is mostly used by guys to tell other guys how “bro” their life is. “Bro-ness” is usually rated on a scale of how “chill” someone’s night was, how much natty ice they drank, or how many bitches they had. While as a girl I can sometimes find this website offensive, there are definitely entries that are funny and entertaining.

Movies

Funnyordie.com is another website used for entertainment purposes, containing a compilation of videos, pictures, words, and news that the creators think the public will find humorous. And they succeed. Created by Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, and Adam McKay, funnyordie.com is a comedic website strictly for celebrities, as opposed to sites like YouTube which are open to the public.

Finally, rottentomatoes.com is the only website mentioned that serves a purpose aside from entertainment and procrastination.  This website is used to rate movies by compiling all the reviews written about the film and giving it a percentage grade based on these reviews. If a movie scores under an 80%, it is considered a “rotten tomato”. Users can also read the reviews of the movie they are looking for, and reviews from renowned critics have a star next to the name to denote importance.

As seen by the increase in popularity of these websites, it is often difficult for students to focus with so many entertaining resources at their fingertips. Although the internet is an excellent source for research and academics, it is also becoming one of the biggest forms of procrastination and distraction among college students.