Life without a computer

College 401 column

By ROBERT RICH

PALESTINE — Last week, a tragedy occurred. I was on my laptop (a five-year-old Toshiba), working on a monstrous, and ridiculous, project involving Twitter for my Theories of Mass Communication class, when the screen of my computer froze. I couldn't move the mouse, couldn't do anything. I freaked out. After some fiddling, I was able to get it to come back on, but soon after, it malfunctioned again. This time, it didn't just freeze, it turned completely off, unprovoked. I kept messing with settings and doing everything I could to fix it, but it was not to be. I called the technical support center, where I was given a set of instructions but told to do it on my own, because if they'd have walked me through it, I would have been charged 30 bucks due to an expired warranty. Lame.

Alas, the computer is currently on its last legs, breathing the last breaths it will ever know. I've grown quite fond of the machine, from my initial ecstatic euphoria upon receiving it for Christmas when I was in high school, all the way through most of my time at UT, where it has been there for papers, a hefty addition of new music and my forays into the social networking realms of Twitter and Facebook, among other things. It also continued to plug along admirably in spite of jokes aimed in its direction from my roommate, an Apple user and semi-elitist. Coincidentally, I may be replacing the Toshiba with an Apple, but that decision remains firmly in the hands of my parents.

This brief time I've had thus far without a computer of my own has made me all too aware of how much I rely on technology. I still have a BlackBerry (which can access the internet), I still have my iPod, and our apartment still has a working television, and yet, I still feel like something's missing. When I come home and can't go straight to my laptop to surf the internet, a pang of sadness strikes me. It isn't for purely leisurely reasons, however. The fact that I'm in the midst of applying for grad school and working on a lengthy research paper for my “Earth and/or Space Science” class doesn't help.

Ironically, I also just finished reading “Bridge to Terabithia” for my “Children's Literature” course, and it made me long for something similar. Set in the 1970s, it tells the tale of two children, best friends living in a small rural town. The most interesting piece of technology they have is a television set, and the majority of their activities comes from a secluded cave that they named Terabithia. Just like musicians sometimes seclude themselves in the woods to write music, or authors spend a significant amount of time away from the city and computers to pen a novel, I would love to somehow experience the same. Without the distractions provided by television and the constant hustle and bustle of our technological lifestyle, there's no telling what I could create. Maybe I'd finally write a novel, one of my lifelong goals. Maybe I'd get out and exercise, trimming down my ever-expanding gut. Or maybe I'd just sleep. Whatever the result, it'd be something different, a completely new experience.

Odds are though, that will never happen. We're too dependent on technology. Even now, for this column that you're reading, I considered writing it by hand, going old-school, but I just couldn't do it. It was created on my girlfriend's computer (also an Apple), because I don't have tidy handwriting or ability to remember what I come up with long enough to get it on paper.

Let's hope we don't ever have a real version of what everybody was scared about during Y2K, because if that goes down, we're screwed.

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Robert Rich is a senior journalism major at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Westwood High School in 2006. He can be reached via e-mail at robert.rich@mail.utexas.edu