Blog Assignment 13

I extremely dislike admitting failure, but with this assignment I failed. I wouldn't say I failed miserably, but it certainly was not an accomplishment according to the set of rules we were given. I knew from the beginning that it was going to be impossible for me, since I do not have a land line telephone. In fact, I couldn't think of anyone I know that still has a land line telephone. I live about three hours from Mobile, and keeping in touch with my mom is required at least once a day. This is where my cell comes into play. So knowing I was going to fail based on these situations, I took it upon myself to see just how little technology I could go without. My iPhone was probably one of the hardest thing to put away. It has so many apps on it to fight my boredom that I would catch myself reaching for it to play solitaire or baseball. It was a struggle, but I fought off using it except for calls and texts to my mom.

The absolute worse time I had with this experiment was no television or radio. I usually fall asleep at night listening to at least one of them. It was almost impossible for me to fall asleep Wednesday night without some kind of noise going on. I made several people angry for not answering phone calls or text messages. I never turned it off completely, in case of an emergency, but I would monitor who called. If it seemed it wasn't important I did not answer. This probably qualifies as using technology, but again I didn't have access to a land line. Facebook was not a problem to give up at all. I'm one of the few people of my generation that is not addicted to it. I actually find that I have to remind myself to check it from time to time to see if anyone is trying to contact me. I left my computer turned off for the 24 hour period.  I did get a lot of reading done for my classes that I have assigned each week. Usually, it is a chore to make myself sit down and read a book, but with the television and computer turned off it seemed a lot easier to get lost in my books.

This period without many of the technologies has shown me just how important they are in my life. I'm sure that was the purpose of this experiment and it's easy to put myself in my future students' positions. It's like them having to have a 8 hour period everyday where they are subjected to no technologies that they are so accustomed to using.