Since I have been back to school, I have been noticing how much technology has changed the daily lives of college students compared to those of college students in the 80s.
Take for example, cell phones. Like any new development, most of the change is for the better, while some of the change is not so good. When I lived in the dorms, I had a phone in my room, in which I could receive calls and make local calls.
To make a long distance call, I had to use a calling card. When I lived in the fraternity house, we had two phones to share; we had one phone in the lodge/kitchen and one in the hallway where the rooms were located.
Now, a cell phone is a basic part of life. And for the most part, this is good, being able to contact just about anyone at anytime.
Especially with texting. You can send a text and they can open it at a later time and respond back to you when it is best for them.
Another benefit of texting is that mass texting can be done. One example of this is that over the summer, I received texts from UNM stating that there was an active shooter at UNMH, and that I should stay away from there, so I did. In the 80s, there was really no way to do this type of mass communication, but then again, we did not have active shooters on campuses either.
Another area where I see technology affecting college students’ lives is in the world of dating. In the 80s, if you wanted to ask someone out, you had to actually talk to them. For some people, the first conversation can involve a lot of anxiety. Social networking sites like Facebook and the ability to text a person can take a lot of anxiety out of the first conversation.
You can also get a feeling of where the conversation, and the possible relationship is going based on the actual words that they use. With respect to dating, I have seen technology have the opposite effect as well.
This past spring semester, I took Pharmacy and Anatomy and Physiology II at the same time. About halfway through the semester, I had to spend both Friday and Saturday evenings, two weeks in a row, at Zimmerman or the IT pod studying. This was the first time in my collegiate career that I had to spend a Friday and Saturday evening studying.
While I was there, I noticed a group of students playing “World of Warcraft.” I could not help but think that when I was their age, I was discovering alcohol and women, and I would not be caught dead in a library or computer pod on a Friday or Saturday evening.
The major negative aspect that I do see about cell phones, and advancing technology in general, is the loss of privacy and how deep and vast that loss is. When I was a Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge, my pledge class ran through all five sorority houses in our underwear. We did this on a Wednesday from 1-3 a.m. This was a traditional part of I-week (or initiation week) and approximately 40 pledge classes had done this before mine. It is not done now and hasn’t been done since the late 90s.
At the time there were no digital cameras, just regular cameras with film that had to be developed into pictures. And there also was no Internet with which to send these pictures worldwide.
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Although there were a relatively large number of pictures taken of us, over the span of four years, most of them disappeared. This event in no way affected my job search after college.
Today, they would be all over the Internet and be there forever, for anyone to see. At the time, I was having fun. However, after scanning social networks, like Facebook, a human resources recruiter for a company would think this was stupid and put my application in the trash.
In my opinion, collegiate life involves more than academics; it includes other extracurricular activities where a student grows emotionally, socially, and in other ways.
Some of the social growth can involve doing crazy things that you do with your friends that you will remember the rest of your life.
However, with every cell phone having a camera on it, and everyone having a cell phone, as well as the Internet being there to permanently record those events for everyone in the world to see, the social growth that college students experience may become stunted.
