Look into any hallway at EHS during passing time, and it’s clear how much technology is embedded into our everyday lives. Due in part to the district’s reliance on Moodle, SchoolView, and other websites, we’re beginning to spend most of our days in front of a screen. Cell phones (and the Internet in general) are now just as important to schoolwork as textbooks and pencils. But what happens when someone chooses to unplug, if only for a few days?
To find out how deep our addictions run, we decided to give up anything with a computer chip in it for three [strikethrough] two days. We could drive to school, and we made an exception for our calculators, but pretty much everything else was out. No phones, televisions, computers, or iPods for forty-eight hours – a big change from our usual two or three hours each day of texting and Internet use.
The first thing we found out was that we had more free time than we’d ever known. Without Facebook or texting capabilities, we could actually finish our homework before 2 a.m., get an adequate amount of sleep, and spend some time outside. The spark of procrastination was still there, but the fuel was gone.
Another, more obvious thing we found out was that it’s rather difficult to communicate with friends when you’re unable to use technology. By far, the hardest area of this was making plans. The highest technology we would allow ourselves for sending messages was handwritten notes, which proved ineffective.
Our friends text-bombed us after they found out that we had given up technology to annoy us, and when we logged back onto Facebook, we had an absurd number of notifications. During our time without technology, we felt more removed from our friends, but not totally disconnected. We compensated for our inability to text by spending more time face-to-face with others.
The most surprising revelation that came out of this was that we don’t really need to be on Facebook into the wee hours of the morning to be happy. In fact, our lives were a little bit less stressful without the Internet – you’d never believe how freeing it is not to be able to check SchoolView every fifteen minutes, and, surprisingly, we were able to do our assignments from class offline without much of a time gap. Sure, we did go through a bit of withdrawal at the start, but in the end, we might just try this again and see if our lives are a little bit better for it.
