A Day Without Technology

Pogoplug

Like most college students I too love my technology; however, the technology I use daily is a little different.   Unlike most people my age I am one of the few that is not addicted to social media sites like Facebook, instead I am addicted to the multiple gadgets that fill my desk. These gadgets include my Pogoplug, projector, laptop, and the list goes on.  These technologies fill my daily life all of them get used multiple times a day and over the weekend I decide to see if I could go without them. That’s right 24 hours without the technology I rely on most. Going in to it I figured I could pull it off but was wondering how easy or hard it was going to be so with questionable emotions about what I was doing on Friday night I turned everything off and unplugged what I could and went to bed. 

Email

When I awoke Saturday I was confused this was caused by the fact that my normal alarm didn’t go off and I had been woken up two hours later than usual by my brother’s alarm clock. From there the confusion just got worse as I fallowed my morning routine and went to my computer to check my email only for my computer to not turn on.  It took about ten minutes of me pushing the power button and trying different things for me to realize that I had unplugged it for this experiment.   From there I got up and carried on with the day.  Overall the day went smooth and tech free, I spent most of my time outside doing yard work.  Every once and a while I caught myself reaching into my pocket for my cell phone, which I decided to also go without, trying to see what time it was or if anyone had sent me a text just to find my pocket to be empty. The hardest part of Saturday was the inability to watch the Thunder game.  When went inside I wanted to go straight for the TV and watch the game but instead I decided to go on a long walk and get away. By the time I got back the day was pretty much over and I got ready and went to bed.

 

The next day I was happy the “day without” was over as I turned everything back on.  Overall the day without technology went smooth and relatively easy.   This experiment however opened my eyes to one of the bad routines that had had fallen into too. I was amazed that I was mindlessly starting everyday with technology by going straight to my computer to check my emails.  As a result, since the experiment I have changed my morning routine to where using technology I one of the last things I do making my morning a little less dependent on technology.

The Many Faces of Email

As a person that grew up during the evolution of modern technology, I’ve seen people use technology and even used them myself. Now as an 18 year old college student my life has become partially dependent of these technologies.  The one that has played the biggest role in my life is E-mail. This one technology manage to simplify my life and workload as I first started to use it but as time has gone one the thing that simplified my life slowly started to complicate it.

The AOL man

I was first introduced to this communication technology though my parents who used it for work; this was when I was about 12. At that time this technology had little to no direct effect on my life. When I turned 16 however that all changed I received a job and Chicken and Chops LLC as a cook also at this time I received my own Aol email account.  At my new job I started out as just a cook but by the third month on the job I started to receive task of an assistant manager.  I then started to use email to contact the restaurants food providers making and confirming orders. It simplified my life because I went from doing messy kitchen work to simple light management work. 

Then email reached my personal life. I would email friends and instead of having to find a meeting place to work on a group project we would just email and send the file back and for the with different corrections that we made. It made group work simple then my high school English teacher then started to have us submit our papers electronically that way she could grade on her computer.

Not long after this, the negative side of this great technology started to show itself.  My email account quickly filled with spam and junk mail sometimes causing me to over look important emails that were about work or school work and grades. The biggest complication that this technology brought to my life is my grades; teachers were no longer burdened by having to walk to the main office to call parents.  Now any bad grade whether it is for a work sheet or a test was sent via email to my parents.  At work deadlines for orders that sometimes were mailed were shorted removing the time allotted for postal service and forcing the use of email.

Not much has changed since then, email still plays a big role in my current life though both school and work, but both the simplification and complication sides of this great technology are still presented every day which makes me question; is this technology is worth putting up with its dual sided personality or would it be better if we took a step back and did without?