Introduction

Hello everybody. My name is Alex Weintraub, I am a freshman here at Rutgers. I am from Westfield, NJ, a medium sized suburban town not too far away. My academic interests include history, philosophy, and french. Outside of the classroom, I enjoy playing video games (competitively), paintball, and fitted hats. I am also a fan of wallabees. I enjoy watching basketball, as well as playing it. I did not really accomplish anything meaningful in high school, but I plan to pursue worthwhile endeavor whilst here at Rutgers. Anyway...

Over the past three days I have certainly interacted with technology extensively. The majority of time using technology is spent either on my phone or using the internet, like most others I would assume. I spend a good deal of time on facebook; about three hours on average everyday. However, I do not accomplish such a feat in one sit-in; I sporadically sign in throughout the day. Also, I spend about two hours-three hours a day playing Counter-Strike, an online first-person shooter (that's been around since 1998). On Sunday, I spent about 8 hours (this is not the usual amount I spent glued in to the tube) watching Lord of the Rings in my dorm room. Though, I usually only spend about an hour watching TV a day, if that. When I was back living at home, this amount was considerably larger. Other than this, my interaction with technology is usually spent by checking out music on iTunes and randomly surfing the web, accounting for maybe 2 hours a day.

I have conducted a similar experiment as this one last year during high school. I have already accepted the extreme amount of time I spend everyday using technology, and so I am not so surprised this time around to see how much of my life is spent in the virtual world. However, when I originally accounted my time spent on the web/ technology, I was dumbfounded as to how much of my life is spent indoors, on my chair, wasting away in the virtual world. I do not think that I am an outlier of any sense, and that most people spend just as much time as I do, if not more, using technology. I feel as though there is no way of reverting back to past lifestyles, and the time we spend everyday glued in to screens of some sort is just how life is nowadays, and that this time is a direct consequence of the virtual age. I don't necessarily think that the time I spend using the web is such a bad thing, although I could see why people are so frightened of current technology: life really does not mirror every day culture about twenty or thirty years ago.