With the random chaos of moving out of the dorms and into residential houses or apartments for the summer, it seems that after two weeks now, things are starting to get back to normal around here.Most of the debris from students moving out has been either looted or collected, classes are back in full swing and Court Street is looking less and less like a ghost town with each passing day.
But something just isn't right. Even though most of this town evacuated like impending doom was near a couple weeks back, the same number of students with laptops are hanging out on College Green and the Learning Commons on the second floor of Alden is packed every day like it is during Finals Week.
So what's the deal, all-knowing summer columnist?
The deal is that, because of the numerous requests being made to Athens only internet provider, Time Warner Cable, many students have lost the luxury of Internet whenever they please for the first couple weeks of the summer.
I have met students who have to wait until July 30 before they can stalk someone on The Facebook or check the away message of someone they haven't talked to since middle school via AOL Instant Messenger.
For me, I had to wait until last Thursday for these procrastination aids to return to my life, and it could not have come soon enough.
I had never realized how pathetically attached I had become to these Web sites that I realize are an enormous waste of time.
I pretended to be annoyed with my lack of Internet because I was unable to look up important information without having to go on campus, which I really believed at the time to be true. But whenever I did make the voyage to College Green with laptop in hand, I realized that I had just made a 15-minute walk to look at important information for maybe five minutes and the aforementioned Internet crap for an hour.
As sad and pitiful as my tale is, I know I'm not alone in this. Just take a walk through the library and glance at what people are looking at on the monitors in front of them. More often than not, The Facebook and MySpace, coupled with a buddy list of some kind in the upper-right-hand corner, will be seen more frequently than a Microsoft Word document or an assignment on BlackBoard (although they may be minimized on the toolbar at the bottom).
At this point in time you may think I'm going to say how we, as a generation, need to break away from these garbage Web sites that are tearing us away from the more important things in life. Nope.I'm sick and tired of older people saying how easy we have it at school now because of the Internet so, instead, I'm opting to praise our generation for being able to deal with these distractions and still turn in quality work.
Our predecessors, just ten years ago at this fine university, did not have Internet or cable TV in their dorms yet they still had the same level of difficulty in the assignments given to them. Groundbreaking literature, breakthrough experiments and investigative journalism are all still coming from students who are poking and IMing at the same time.
So, fellow students, I'm recommending that we live it up. Let's keep those buddy lists full of people we will never talk to again, continue to stalk these aforementioned strangers by compulsively checking their away messages and look at every possible picture on their Webshots. You never know when that connection will be lost.
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Andrew Gribble
