By Clara Prander ’22
A couple of days ago, our school experienced a complete network shutdown. The whole school’s wifi was down from the afternoon to late at night, causing everyone to panic. Our school’s cell service is also somewhat unreliable causing us to not have any internet at all. How were we supposed to keep up with what was happening online? How would we be able to not use Snapchat for such a long time!? How would we be able to do our homework without being able to even access it? These questions among others arose in all of our minds. Everyone ended up in a sort of panicked state. Among us today, there are few places where we don’t have any access to the internet and this event really showed how unfamiliar we are with it.
While some people are so dependent on their phone that they are out of their minds, others took the opportunity to do things they rarely do. Some went to the library to play Cards Against Humanity, others learned to play chess and some just sat in their rooms and talked without the distraction of notifications all the time. While I know that some people thought that it was awful, I found it quite peaceful. My phone is something I always carry with me without even reflecting upon it, it’s almost like a detachable piece of my body. Without the possibility of people being able to reach me, and me not being able to check social media all the time, I felt peaceful in a new way. Some people might think that we all were overreacting, but being brought up in the 21st century, we’re all used to having a phone from a young age. I haven’t experienced much of my life without social media. At all times of the day we can reach someone we know, stalk people we absolutely don’t know or with just some clicks look up facts we didn’t know.
I love the internet, I can’t imagine life without the internet; but it’s also kind of sad that we’re all dependent on it. A life without wifi would not be possible in today’s society. When our wifi shut down, we all felt paralyzed. The world we have created around us can’t function without wifi. Even if we could do our math homework, we actually couldn’t access the page where it says what problems we were supposed to solve. In the end it is kind of ironic how without the internet our whole world falls apart.
It seems like we’re creating a sort of self-inflicted sabotage. So many people miss out on other far more memorable experiences when they are glued to their phone and so many things have gone lost because of it. I don’t think we should abolish our phones but it would certainly not hurt if we got a tiny bit less attached and dependent on them.
Instead of looking down at our phones to see what our friends are doing, we should spend that time to actually see each other.
The Highlander 