As a student, technology is a necessary evil. Since I have
started college, almost all assignments have moved online, and getting in
contact with your professors is almost exclusively done through email, so for
me, my laptop and i-Phone are always on me, especially on campus. However, as
technology has started to get more and more entrenched into our daily lives, I
have started to pull back a little and I must admit that I use my phone far
less frequently then most people my age, however I still use it very often. As
I read Jenna Worthom’s articles, “Turn Off the Phone (and the Tension)” I
immediately found myself picturing my friends. Like Jenna, my friends are often
unable to disconnect from the internet/ their phones no matter where they are,
on a hike, in the pool, even in the shower sometimes! I was glad to see that
Worthom began to realize the beauty of living in the moment and looking at the
world around her, and not just the digital world. I was so excited to hear that
I wasn’t the only one who started to feel that I was missing out when I looked
at social networks and saw my friends or family doing things that I wasn’t
there for. I think JOMO (Joy of
missing out) is precisely accurate, if we look less on what everyone else is
doing and more on what we are doing, we will be much happier. John T. Peters’
article, “Your Summer Vacation Unplugged: is it even possible”, really got me
thinking and almost… almost tempted me to try out a summer disconnected for
myself. But then I realized that, while social media and technology can easily
get in our way of fully enjoying life, it is also a super helpful and
definitely cool tool at times!
The challenge we were assigned to unplug from our phone and
the Internet for me was do-able since I actually do it more often than I
thought! However, I had to wait until the weekend to try this out since I can’t
disconnect during the school week. Yesterday (Saturday) I disconnected for
almost a full day, from about 11am till 8pm. During this time I did things like
catch up on the books I am juggling currently, I made a home-cooked meal from a
recipe from an actual book (ha!), and I also went to see a movie. At about the
middle of the day I found my mind wondering to Instagram and my email, but I
quickly let those thoughts pass. I did run into a problem however when I headed
to the movie theatre to see Divergent for the third time (I checked the times
before unplugging), and realized I don’t know how to get to the theatre without
using the GPS on my phone. So I went old-school and pulled into a gas-station
to ask for directions. Other than those few small problems, the day went over
with ease.
This class has been one of my favorites of the semester and
I couldn’t have picked a better time to have taken it because it pairs perfectly
with the things we are learning in my communication social media class. This
semester in this class has brought a lot of really awesome statistics to my
attention about major companies, and what they are doing/have done in the past,
as well as helped me to realize just how much our society today relies on
technology, and the internet especially. One of the most shocking things of the
semester was hearing just how much these major companies spend on buying other
companies or apps. Hearing that Google spent so many billions on something was
insane, and help to put it into perspective just how much power these fortune
500 companies have.
Overall I have very much enjoyed this class and everything
it has taught me! I would recommend it to all Communication majors or minors at
UofL.