A Day Without A Life

Recently, I ventured to participate in a day without technology. It was certainly an interesting experience; mostly for reasons I expected, but also for reasons I had not forseen. The day was Tuesday, May 3rd and it started off like any other.
My alarm went off (because a certain teacher took away the clever idea of missing class because I couldn't use an alarm), turned off my phone and threw it in my desk so that I wouldn't be tempted to take it to class with me. The night before, I had let my mom know what I was going to be doing so that she wouldn't call SWAT to come find me when I didn't call her for the day but other than that, I told no one. I only had one class that day so I had a lot of time to waste and I figured the best way to spend it would be to sit under a tree and finish off a book I had been meaning to finish for months, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Once finished, I headed back home where I had dinner and spent quality time with my roommates.
The day seems deceivingly simple and it was indeed a wonderful day. But when I turned my phone back on at about 1am that night, I found about 15 text messages and there were tons of notifications on facebook, it was overwhelming. My boyfriend had sent about half of the text messages and seemed pretty irate that I hadn't texted back. Surely he thought I was ignoring him and on second thought, I probably should have told him about my day without technology but what can you do?
The day was the complete opposite of what I had been expecting. I had expected to be miserable without my phone, laptop, flat iron, iPod, etc., but I ended up being fine without them; it was the other people in my life that weren't fine with me not having them. Surely, if I hadn't told my mom, she would have thought something terrible had happened to me and my boyfriend ended up more miserable than I had been about the whole thing. What an interesting twist my day seems to have been after I've had the time to reflect on it. Is it just that we are dependent on these devices as individuals or has a whole new culture evolved, hindering us from being able to detach from devices and the emotions that are tied to them at all?

Futuristic Tradition

I'm proud to announce that I now have the honor of being the Vice President of Membership for my sorority, Tau Beta Sigma. We are a service sorority dedicated to helping bands and serving music as a whole. This thursday, I will go through the initiation ceremony to officially resume my responsibilities as Vice President of Membership. The whole process is very traditional and meaningful but the thing that surprises me the most is that technology has found its way into our rituals. Whole offices have been affected by the everyday advances in technology, their responsibilities warped into something entirely new.

My office, persay, hasn't been that effected. Rush events and education haven't changed drastically, after all. But offices like Secretary and Historian have been entirely transformed. The Secretary, whose job once consisted of taking notes and keeping attendance, now includes keeping track of all chapter going-ons, attendance, sending out a weekly reminder email, and much more. Basically all of these have something in common: a computer. Even for the election last thursday, the winning factor was the candidate's ability to make and manipulate a website. The Historian position also has been warped to include not only keeping track of the family tree and artifacts but also picture- and video-taking, scrapbook making, and electronically recording all historical information.

It's amazing how technology can find a way to creep into every aspect of our lives and change everything around, even century old rituals and traditions.