A day on the internet in 2010

Sam presses the power button on a two-year-old Dell laptop and goes to make coffee. Windows 7 takes about a minute to reach the desktop from its spinning hard drive, then another minute while the antivirus updates, Windows Live Messenger signs in, and Firefox 3.6 restores yesterday's fourteen tabs.

Three toolbars sit under the address bar: one from a Java update, one from the antivirus, one nobody remembers installing. Sam ignores them, like everyone else.

Facebook loads with the blue bar and the Top News feed. A friend has uploaded 84 photos from Saturday titled "halloween pregame!!!" (shot on a Canon point-and-shoot, tagged over breakfast). Sam Likes three, comments "hahaha" on one, and untags the fourth.

There are two FarmVille requests from an aunt, an event invitation for a lecture-hall screening of The Social Network, and a Facebook Chat message from Priya that just says "did u see the new twitter". Sam changes their status to "so tired. midterms." Eleven people will Like it by lunch.

Sam types "deepwater horizon" into Google and results appear before the word is finished, Google Instant having launched a month earlier. Ten blue links: Wikipedia first, a BBC explainer, a BP page, a YouTube clip of the underwater camera.

Wikipedia opens in its new Vector skin with a banner asking for donations. Sam copies a paragraph into a Google Doc shared with two classmates, whose cursors are already moving in green and orange, and adds "[citation needed]" as a joke.

A friend sends a link. It is the Bed Intruder Song, for the fifth time, and Sam watches it anyway in 360p on the cafeteria Wi-Fi, the red buffering bar creeping ahead of the playhead. Annotations pop up begging for subscriptions. The top comment has 4,000 thumbs up and says "hide yo kids, hide yo wife".

Related videos on the right: Double Rainbow, the Old Spice guy, an OK Go video that took sixty takes, and a Ray William Johnson episode about all three. Sam clicks the yellow Subscribe button.

The Tumblr dashboard is dark blue and endless. Sam reblogs a GIF set from last night's Glee, a photo of a foggy pier with 12,000 notes, a rage comic about group projects, and a quote attributed to a person who never said it. Someone has asked Sam's blog an anonymous question: "what's your favourite Inception theory".

A librarian walks past. Sam switches to the Google Doc. The librarian leaves. Sam switches back.

Back in the dorm, Sam opens a Flash game portal. The preloader crawls from 0 to 100 percent while a sponsor logo glows. It is a one-button runner: hold space, jump the gaps, die, retry. Chat scrolls beside the game. Sam's roommate plays Robot Unicorn Attack on the other laptop with the sound up, and Erasure's Always leaks across the room.

You can play this one. The game here is an original recreation of the genre, not a copy of any 2010 title.

Windows Live Messenger nudges. Sam's best friend Priya is on her BlackBerry Bold, so she is on BBM and everyone else has to text her. Sam's parents call on Skype from the kitchen webcam, pixelated and three seconds behind. Facebook Chat has four conversations going, two of them about whether to see Jackass 3D on Friday.

Priya's display name on MSN is still "~*~ cAliFoRnia gUrLs ~*~" from July. Sam changes theirs to a Kanye lyric and goes to make instant noodles.

Sam opens LimeWire, unaware that a federal court will switch it off in two weeks. The search for the new Kanye track returns nine results with three different bitrates and one that is definitely a virus. Sam buys it on iTunes for $1.29 instead, feeling responsible, then torrents a TV episode with µTorrent, feeling less so.

Before bed: a vBulletin forum thread about the iPhone 4's antenna, 340 pages long, with signature banners the size of billboards; Google Reader, 1,000+ unread; one last look at Facebook. The laptop goes to sleep at 00:40. Tomorrow the whole thing happens again.