Andrea Trejo Hernandez

Rhetoric Media & Civic Communication

Jonathan Carter

May 1st, 2017

“A Moment To Live”

   I was thinking about our current society and how we communicate, noticing that we are always “connected,” but are we really engaging? Well, to be honest, we are not. We always have a comment, a like, a video that follows us everywhere, but we don’t have actual communication. In the article “Busy Very Busy” they describe two types of experiences one where you just pass by and live the moment, but you don’t create any type of connection it happens then you immediately ignore it and continue with life. The other one is depth experience where you live the moment and make it yours, you feel it and engage with it. With the internet, we always live experiences, but they never have depth. Also, this article mentions and idea created by Plato where he suggests us to create “Distance,” to organize our ideas. Therefore my professor decided to assign us an experiment to help us create “Distance.” We were not allowed to use any type of media or electronic devices unless it had something to do with school. He also assigned us a reading “Not So Busy” that was going to provide us with advice to help us with the experiment.

   My first attempt was an epic Fail 😒 in the reading “Not so Busy” they mentioned “Accidently leave your mobile at home when you go out on the weekend, just to see how everyone reacts when they can’t find you” I was trying to follow every step so I didn’t tell none of my friends I was going to be away for 3 days. I turned my phone off and left it in my dorm. Usually, I always answer my snapchats and my friends noticed that I had not answered my snapchats so of them texted me and I still didn’t answer, then he called me and I didn’t answer so he decided to call me on messenger and that’s when I answered. I explained everything to him because he was really worried, so I decided to post it on facebook and start again.

I continued leaving my phone in my dorm and it was really hard at the beginning. I had a certain feeling of emptiness and I realized how much I depended on technology. After the first day, I got used to it a little bit more and I realized that it wasn’t as bad. I had the chance to finish all my study reviews for my finals and study. I paid more attention to what I was doing and I even had time to take a nap. The only thing I hated was not being able to listen to music that was something that I will never get used to. I also noticed that it was hard to communicate with other people when I was the only one without a phone, therefore it became me and my books type of thing.

Once we were done we were supposed to do the opposite and binge use media and I loved it. The first thing I did was play some music. After that, I knew that it was going to be distracting so I decided to teach my snapchat friends a little bit of Geology that way I was studying and using media. Also, I liked every post on Instagram possible and commented in some which helped me get a lot of followers. At least, I texted my friends and snapchat them as much as possible. I accept I loved it, but it was a big waste of time and it was tiring at some point I didn’t even know what else to do.