I have mixed feelings about college. On one hand, I look forward to attending classes for continuous exposure to new knowledge excites me. However, I do not appreciate the fact that college education is like a shadow of students. Unlike a regular job where people can leave everything behind and head home after an eight hour shift, schooling entails endless work that requires students put forth an effort on and off campus. For this very reason, I would describe my feelings for my laptop is a fine representation of my attitude towards college.
My laptop is one in the Toshiba Satellite line of products. From the outside in its open position, the computer consists of a seventeen inch screen in the vertical dimension and a standard keyboard with a touch pad horizontally. In a metallic blue shell along with a fingerprint reader, the unit appears to be bulky and heavy, which exudes a sense of sturdiness. Under the hood, this laptop has some fairly powerful key components such as a Duo Core processor and two gigabytes of memory, all of which ensures the possibility of multitasking. Lastly, the enabled wireless connectivity allows the owner, me, to stay mobile with the Internet.
My laptop is my endeared friend and dreaded enemy. I enjoy the occasional movie and TV watching on its high definition screen for I don’t own a fancy television. In addition, I appreciate the convenience from its mobile internet connectivity. However this is also where things go sour with the computer. I classify my laptop as my workstation on which I process and store nearly all the school related documents. Therefore the laptop’s mobility creates an opportunity to blur the line between study time and personal time. Although the convenience of mobility goes both ways, I discover my personal time is more often invaded. College is an intellectually rigorous experience. To do well, students commit more time and effort than the lectures they sit through at school. Thanks to laptop’s mobility, I often find myself staring at spreadsheets even at 1 am when it is supposedly people’s bedtime. I don’t consider this a healthy convenience.
America is easily one of the most hardworking societies in the world. Our consumer culture constantly pushes us to be financially accomplished. To obtain this goal, everybody must commit themselves to harsh work standards and ethic: work anytime and anywhere you can and it’ll pay off tomorrow. Laptops are a representative byproduct of this belief for it allows people to literally carry work with them. Nonetheless while enjoying the convenience of mobile computers, have we ever examined and questioned ourselves? How much laptop time have we consumed at the expense of foregoing interpersonal communication and interaction or simply personal health? I wouldn’t argue the fact that laptop computers are a clever invention. However, while taking advantage of modern technology, we must reserve space and time for activities that make us normal, healthy humans. I wonder what it would be like to have a UC Davis No-Laptop Day.
4 comments:
I am curious about this phrase "a shadow of students"—I think you could expand on this, either here or in a future post. This is a very thoughtful and nuanced post, and I take your points entirely, particularly as I sit here on a Sunday night working, past my own deadline (eesh!), reading what seem to be endless posts, comments, and tangential bits of information...!
This post raises an interesting question; how has the purpose of the laptop evolved over time?
HP advertises with their laptops that “Now the computer is personal again.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsE0g-8CDQo). This implies that they had lost that personal quality in the first place, but when has a “PC” (Personal Computer) ever lost such a quality? To my understanding laptops were first made as a way for corporate workers to work from anywhere. In a way this relates to our discussion of mobility. A laptop’s initial purpose was to make work more mobile for a person by allowing the person to work in other places besides the office. There is a video here (http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1329508/the_evolution_of_the_laptop/) showing the evolution of the laptop and includes ideas of future laptops to come. It can be seen that the laptop was never intended to become personal and was strictly used for business outside the workplace. There are no friendly user interfaces or other programs on the older computers.
Laptops today can perform the same tasks as a regular desktop. I would even go as far as to say it is a mobile desktop. Laptops adopted their feature of being personal when they were being made to perform like a desktop at home. Because of that development, laptops could also be considered PCs. In your post you say that you find that your personal time is invaded by schoolwork. I guess in this sense a laptop’s primary function today is for personal use. Especially when we can load our music libraries, personal movies, and photo albums on to them. Not to mention, laptops are our gateway (no pun intended) to our digital and virtual alternative lives. Now we see not only the blurring of reality and virtual reality, but also the blurring of what is personal and what is business, or school. I guess a laptop serves as this instrument that blurs such edges.
Ric, try not to puch youself too hard ... every sword has 2 sides, you know that. And I still love StarCraft, thank you very much.
Maybe your mixed feelings are not about college but truly about being contently connected. What you said about college, “I do not appreciate the fact that college education is like a shadow of students” made me wonder if this was the way college was 10 year ago. Being in college today it seems like we are thrown in this period of technology that follows into every part of our lives. Like you said it does not end after an eight-hour day at school, it follows us home, to work and even into our bedtime. This same dependency that is creating this shadow over not only students but also everyone else, is the very selling point of technology especially laptops. Laptops are selling on want and need of always have the world at your finger tips at any moment of time.
Your post made me think back to class and the goggle picture of “the fractured family” because this seems to me like a family that is suffering from the “dark shadow” of technology. The father is on the phone, the son in playing in with a video game, the daughter is listening to her ipod and the mother is daydreaming. Without anyone talking to her maybe the mother is daydreaming because she has nothing else to do. Your post and “the fractured family” made me think of my family, when we get all together it seems like everyone is on their own laptops, cell phones, ipods, or another piece of technology. If college was not like this 10 years ago, I wonder what is will be like 10 years from now?
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