By Adele Zhou
<[email protected]>

Ah. To be sitting in front of a computer screen once again. Never did I think that the artificial glow of my computer would be so comforting.

Allow me to explain. In the spring of this year, the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) conducted a study titled “A Day Without Media.” The assignment for the 200 students at the University of Maryland was simple enough: Find a 24-hour period in which the subject pledges to give up all use of media, which included Facebook, Twitter, magazines, television, cell phones, and iPods.

Twenty-four hours? No big deal. Even an Internet addict like me could handle a simple task like this…

I began at 7 p.m. on a Sunday. Initially, I found myself irritated. It wasn’t that I could not survive without technology; it’s just that I was so used to having the freedom of being able to log onto Facebook or turn on the television anytime I wanted, and having this freedom taken away made me feel significantly less in-control.

The most obvious difference I noticed was the silence. Without my iPod, my house was eerily quiet. As time passed, I found myself humming to an endless stream of music. When one song ended, another song lodged itself in my head, and it was as if my iTunes had implanted itself in my voicebox. I missed the music terribly, so much that later on I decided to play my piano for the first time in months to sever the silence. So maybe “Fur Elise,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Frosty the Snowman” aren’t exactly the songs occupying my iPod, but I was desperate.

I also noticed that there were many mentions of Facebook at school during my 24 hours of media seclusion. One kid in my math class said he followed the entire Colts v. Patriots football game solely by being on Facebook. During lunch, a friend brought up something that had happened to her, and others chimed in that they already knew about it after seeing her status the previous night.

In the ICMPA study, after the 200 students were done with their 24-hour media seclusion sessions, they were asked to write their thoughts in a brief paragraph. The ICMPA compiled the data, consequently stating that “teens and young adults today place an unprecedented priority on cultivating an almost minute-to-minute connection with friends and family.” The study goes on to show that “much of that energy is going towards cultivating a digital relationship with people who could be met face-to-face – but oftentimes the digital relationship is the preferred form of contact.”

I was somewhat offended by the results of this study. It makes our generation seem like we are failing to value human contact in the face of technology. The fact that young people are increasing attention on digital relationships is true. But that doesn’t mean that the relations with family and friends are suffering. In fact, at least with the people I know, the digital relationships are simply adding on to face-to-face relationships. The study places a negative tone on digital relationships, making it seem like it is taking away from more personal relations. However, as long as people care enough to contact each other, no matter what the methods are, that couldn’t possibly be weakening the connection. It doesn’t make sense that knowing more about people should impede on relationships.

Perhaps the point of the 24-hour experiment was to make the subjects realize how much communication has grown to depend on technology. But although some may view this dependency as a bad thing and claim that it is making people more disconnected, in truth, I believe it’s simply a different way of communication, and overall, an step towards progress. It may seem cliché, but as time passes, things change. Studies claim that relationships are breaking down, but there is more communication than ever before. People around the world interact with each other instantly in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier years. Students on school nights connect with friends online, and families who may live far apart break down geographic barriers to communicate. Technology has made communication easier, faster, and reliable, which means that there is more of it. What’s so bad about that?