How we worked out your web animal

Our web animals are just for fun, but the test is based on solid and rigorous science, so your results should tell you something interesting about your web behaviour.

Three aspects of your web behaviour were used to work out your web animal.

Adaptable or specialised?

The internet allows us to do lots of things at the same time. You might be listening to music and updating your blog while receiving news alerts and chatting online with friends. Then an email arrives. Can you switch seamlessly between different tasks? Or are you actually less efficient?

Indeed, a study from Stanford University in California suggests that people who spend their time multitasking might actually be less good at juggling tasks than non-multitaskers.

If you are an ‘adaptable’ web animal, then you scored highly on our tests that measured your ability to multitask. If your web animal is ‘specialised’, then you are probably better suited to taking on one task at a time.

Fast-moving or slow-moving?

The internet helps people find information fast. Practice makes perfect, and its possible to learn techniques for getting to the information you need quickly. But speed isn’t the same as accuracy. The first answer you find isn’t necessarily the right answer.

We measured the time it took you to complete a series of search tasks. If you are a fast-moving web animal, you took less time than average. This maybe because you know exactly what you’re doing, but could also mean you missed important information. If you are a slow-moving web animal, this could be because you’re less confident, that you focused on getting the right answer rather than the first one.

Social or solitary?

The internet has radically multiplied the ways in which we can meet new friends and stay in contact with existing ones. (Internet guru Clay Shirky once said that before the internet came along, the most recent technology that affected the way people sat down and talked to each other was the table.) So how social are you online?

If your web animal is social, you probably told us you spend quite a lot of time on social networking sites and that you tend to trust sites whose content is created by its users. If your web animal is solitary, you probably don’t socialise as much online and are inclined to trust sites whose content is produced in a more traditional, ‘authoritative’ way.

Social behaviour online is a fascinating area of study for our scientists. They would like to understand the relationship between time spent online and the type of information sources users choose to trust.

The programme interviews Ory Okollah from Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili), Howard Rheingold, Founded of The Well,, John Perry Barlow “you don’t need to control people much if you control what they believe”, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of “the web”, w3, Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, and Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia.

Having listened to Dame Professor Wendy Hall (She is a Founding Director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative) at the LLAS conference yesterday, and her tales of conferences with Tim Berners-Lee and others, particularly fascinating. I’m still watching it, looking forward to the rest of the series, and wondering if it’s going to be available in any format after i-player’s 7 days are up!

“Twenty years on from the invention of the World Wide Web, Dr Aleks Krotoski looks at how it is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. Joined by some of the web’s biggest names – including the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and the web’s inventor – she explores how far the web has lived up to its early promise.

In the first in this four-part series, Aleks charts the extraordinary rise of blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube, and traces an ongoing clash between the freedom the technology offers us, and our innate human desire to control and profit.”

Visit “The Virtual Revolution” website.