18 Hours of Telecommunicative Darkness

My life became entrenched in technology the day I joined Mrs. Hill's 6th grade laptop class at Garfield Elementary School. I was a 13 year old kid sitting in a 6th grade classroom with 28 other students, all with portable computers on our desks. Since then, society has done nothing but embraced technological advance, and my life, as well as the lives of millions of other children my age, has since been centered around technology and its plethora of uses. To go from growing up with an iPod, laptop, cell phone, and desktop computer, to not using any sort of communicative technological devices was quite difficult.

Like 99% of people my age, I thoroughly enjoy texting. I'm not one to rack up a ten thousand dollar phone bill, but I do enjoy talking to friends through text messaging (I have unlimited texting anyway, so it doesn't matter either way!). One of the hardest parts of this project was giving up texting. I'd hear my phone vibrate once and know I received a text from someone. I made it to where the texts would not automatically pop up on my phone, so I just saw the number on my text message inbox increasing every hour. I really never realized how much text messaging plays an integral part in not just my overall life, but specifically my school life. Members of the marketing club I'm in (the Undergraduate Marketing Association) were texting me, and I knew I needed to text back, but I refused. Even the simple task of contacting someone to ask a quick question about homework was more difficult to give up than I would have thought.

Not talking on the phone was also a difficult thing to do. I felt extremely cut off from the world without the ability to text or talk on the phone. Not being able to update my Facebook was also a very difficult task. I would like to think I'm not addicted to it, but I can say that I do enjoy updating it with random stuff once or twice every other day. Social media was definitely one of the hardest things to give up, however even not having the ability to make simple phone calls and text messages made me go slightly insane. After it ended, I was really amused with the thought that people lived like this for hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that 18 hours drove me to near-insanity shows how much of a focus we have on technology today.