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Assignment: Have we as a society become overly obsessed with entertaining ourselves? How much investment do we have in the trivial? How dependent our our existences based on our interactions with electronic media? The purpose of this assignment is to address such questions. You are to live one day (a straight 24 hour period) without interacting with any form of electronic media. This assignment is based on the essay Danna Walker “The Longest Day” which ran in the Washington Post on Sunday August 5, 2007. Make sure to reflect on the essay and other readings/discussions in class. What did you make of this experience? How hard was it to accomplish? What were were expectations? What did you learn from it?

First, let's set the stage for this assignment in my personal context. On any average day, I'm certainly little different than anyone else of my generation: I have my computer on all the time, with my instant messenger programs running, browsing the Internet while watching cartoons on TV or playing video games. If I drive, the radio (or equivalent audio) is playing, and while I dislike talking on the phone, my cellphone is nevertheless on and ready to be answered, should someone call. However, I've "fasted" at least for one week before when on a relatively recent family vacation, so a day hardly seemed an issue. I started on a Friday night (technically Saturday since it was at 2AM) and until 2AM the next night, cut myself off from all electronic media. For nearly all my waking hours that day, I took the opportunity to read my required reading for my Chinese Lit. class, Journey to the West, only breaking for about an hour to help my sister and father move some things to her new house (during which I required that the radio and such had to be off, so we *gasp* talked to each other! I know, what a concept.) I might need another three days like this one soon to get through the other three volumes of that book...

Overall, the day was not hard for me at all. The book is actually fairly interesting to read, and while it was a bit exhausting to continually read for so many hours on end, it's not something I haven't done before on my own accord with a Harry Potter or Dark Tower book. Admittedly, however, I'm a bit disappointed in myself when I finished the first volume a half-hour before 2AM, and instead of just going to sleep, I read a little of another book and waited until after 2AM so that I could turn my computer back on and check on "what I missed" on my usual Internet sites. There was nothing that couldn't have waited until tomorrow, yet, like Frodo learning that The Ring hadn't been lost but instead was in Sam's possession in The Return of the King, I was greedy of that which I knew could use again. It doesn't help that I have a sort of superstition that "the party starts when I'm gone" and, while I don't quite see the Internet as literally a party, it does feel like "stuff happens" for lack of better words. Oh well -- nothing I didn't already know before.

There's a part of me that sighs at the concept of what's essentially considered a "modern life fast" as if electronic media were as necessary as food, that people would actually complain about parting with their cellphones or the radio in their car. Are things like reading a book or doing some manual labor really that difficult or undesirable? And yet, part of me would be a hypocrite if I were to judge others less for thinking that -- I would unlikely be able to recognize myself without technological self-extensions such as video games and the Internet. But why should these newer media be singled out? Why are newspapers exempt from similar scrutiny, or any print for that matter, or the spoken word? Anything man-made -- technology -- is an extension of ourselves, extensions that are remediations of each other (can you think in terms outside of language? What came first: thought or technology?). But I digress -- this media deprivation experience is one that should be exercised more often, so long as it makes people more aware.

I think, when it comes down to it, questions about our culture's dependence on entertainment and technology is a bit misleading. Our (America's) main export is, at least characteristically within this century, in entertainment. For the majority of our short national existence, we've held an isolationist perception on world events. Our lives are not unlike the Hobbits that lived in the Shire in this sense, and like them, we ultimately can not ignore the events around us, but unlike them, we are no longer small and humble as a people, but instead, spreading our influence more like Mordor. Books have already examined the nature of Tolkien's works and the stories they tell of technology and, by default, power, culminated in the One Ring, so I'll avoid going on about that. I do believe however, that deprivation is not the ultimate answer to the problems that arise from these technologies -- casting the One Ring into Mount Doom will not save our Middle Earth, because we're the ones that created it, and we would destroy ourselves and what makes us human in the process. Then what?

I don't know. What do you all think?