Besides the fact that this assignment was very hard and a
change of my daily lifestyle, it actually was very interesting. Due to the fact
that I was visiting friends at the University of Michigan this past weekend,
not using my cell-phone or computer wasn’t as challenging because in a sense, I
was on vacation. However, as my friends and I have discussed about in the past,
the most frequent question asked in college is, “where are you?”, as we are
always wondering where someone is to coordinate grabbing a meal or heading to
the library together. Not using my cell phone eliminated the communication I had
with all my friends back here in Madison, as well as to the outside world to
check up on sports scores, news posts, or what my peers were doing and posting
to social media for Halloween. This really forced all communication to be done
face to face and made meeting up with people much harder. For example, one of
my other friends who traveled with me to Ann Arbor told me he kept texting me
asking what I was doing for the night, because I shut off my phone, I was
unable to answer and he was just confused at why I had been ignoring him. If
this activity had been an everyday thing, I am certain people would see much
less of their friends and be more independent unless coincidently they ran into
each other or coordinated certain times to meet up. From this activity, I found
there was less to worry about actually, and although in the beginning I was
tempted to just break the ice and check Facebook or Twitter, it was kind of
nice to be disconnected and instead enjoy a weekend bonding with friends I don’t
see often without distractions from technology systems. Overall, this was a
good experience to partake in, and crazy to think about how this was commonplace for individuals just over 20 years ago.
Hey Harry, I agree with you in that withdrawing from technology for a while felt somewhat like a vacation. For me too, communication was the main issue because I had to coordinate meeting times and locations with some friends back home. We have become so dependent on digital communication that it's almost impossible to imagine how we would contact each other any other way. Furthermore, I think being entertained by your friends in Ann Arbor made staying away from technology much easier since many of us use our phones to meet up with friends, which you were already doing in Ann Arbor.
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