Today in class, a group gave a
presentation about a company, analyzing the company and offering
recommendations and ways to implement those recommendations. After the
presentation, our professor asked one of the other groups (the class is split
into eight groups) to respond to the recommendations provided by the presenting
group. Now, as a prelude to this story, I should mention that our professor has
made the fatal mistake of allowing students to use laptops in class. As they
had not listened to a word of the presentation, the second group offered up a
series of vague, business-school-sounding responses that made me cringe, and
that in no way related to anything the presenting group had discussed. It was
like watching this woman talk about Obama being a communist. Yep. “Just
study it out”.
Anyway,
apart from making me feel pretty uncomfortable for a few minutes (My life is so
hard), it made me think about our Facebook and iPhone culture, and how much it
affects everything we do.
Since
I have been at college, it has been common in most classes to find the majority
of my peers staring at a laptop screen for the entirety of each class, playing
around on Facebook, Twitter, Sporkle, sending out carefully thought-out e-mails to sorority sisters, or pretty much anything the internet has to
offer. There was a kid in my calc class freshman year that would play online
poker…while watching several youtube videos (at the same time) of other people
playing poker (!). It’s hard not to see the irony in millions of kids (or their
parents) paying thousands a year in tuition so that they can ignore almost
every word of each of their professors’ lectures. I understand that it’s very
much just about getting the grade and the degree, and that a lot of what we
learn doesn’t have a bearing on our future, but it’s still a world-class
education taking a backseat to “angry birds”. And I’m guilty of it too. True, I
don’t bring my computer to class, and the coolest thing my cell phone can do is
tell me what time it is in Chicago, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending
several 85-minute lectures daydreaming about food or girls or whatever else has
been on my mind during the past four years.
The
thing is, this lack of focus doesn’t only pertain to school. It’s everywhere in
the technology age. We watch T.V. while doing our homework. We surf the
internet while watching T.V. We play video games while surfing the internet
while streaming T.V. shows. That last one is a little extreme but trust me,
I’ve seen it. I had a professor who said that our generation loves to
multitask, meaning that we do a half-assed job of several activities at once. It’s
hard to resist with so much technology at our disposal, but it tends to be
rewarding when we do ignore it, focusing only on one activity and being in the
moment.
I
remember when I bought “Tea for the Tillerman” by Cat Stevens, my mom told me how
she and her siblings would gather around her brother’s record player and listen
to the album nonstop when it originally came out. I asked her if they would do
anything else while the record played. She replied with a no- they just sat and
listened. That stuck with me, especially as I often lose sight of how
entertaining music can be on its own, if we just give it proper attention.
Treating music as its own activity feels great and allows us as listeners to
get so much more out of an album. Ok, maybe “Skinny Jeanz and a Mic” doesn’t
quite merit the Cat Stevens treatment, but you get what I’m saying.
I
guess all of this is just pretty disheartening. It’s not fun to have a “conversation”
with someone as they text/Facebook while you’re talking. It’s not fun to share
something important with someone else only to have him or her treat it as
background noise. I’m afraid that if/when I have kids, they will be little monsters
raised by the internet, incapable of looking away from screens, never stopping
to notice the beauty in the little things in the world around them. I know that
I am guilty of some of the things I’ve mentioned above, and I can only try to
get better every day. I hope this post didn’t come off as preachy; I really
just wanted to share some thoughts. Well, until next time, here’s some Cat
Stevens:
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