I know discussing this topic is like beating a dead horse — and about as cliché as employing the phrase — but I feel the need to talk about it nevertheless. There was a campus-wide power outage last Saturday. We were lost! Helpless!
Not being able to turn on the dorm lights made the halls look eerie. This resulted in a mild stomachache, which — just to be safe — I was pressed to look up on WebMD. But no, the Internet was down as well. I figured I’d abandon my need of self-diagnoses and turned to playing cards in attempt to distract my hypochondria. The power outage was already taking a major toll on my psyche. It was then that I realized the only card games I was familiar with were contained on my iTouch, which was out of battery.
It was then that I turned to human interaction and discovered the true meaning of Christmas. Not really. Instead, I discovered how reliant the rest of the girls on my hall were on technology. Due to the trajectory of the sun at 10 in the morning, the south facing rooms of the East Wing of Alamitos remained buried in darkness. Five girls —including myself — sat for an hour in this unaccustomed darkness. We survived just fine, that is until one of us brought up a song we couldn’t remember the lyrics to or an event for which we were unsure of the time. Once uncertainty became involved and Google was no longer an option, the five of us girls — most likely illustrating the mindset of those debilitated others in the Residence and Cerritos dorms — plummeted in self-pity. Yes, we have no trouble recognizing our reliance on technology. However, what we do struggle with is finding a solution to the problem at hand. Not even Bear Grylls, star of Man vs. Wild, can truly survive without technological intervention. And even though he was busted for ‘faking it’ during his first season, Grylls was illustrating the problem our society faces today.
As our phones lost battery and our fridges started to leak, the five of us began discussing our plans for winter break. We spoke about our families and our future plans, and all this within the confines of an otherwise depressing residence.
We hadn’t any food on the premises, and with the power outage affecting the campus dining facilities as well, we saw little hope in making the trek outside.
I ended up using the time to decorate my room for the holidays. A few girls read, while others complained on the phone about how undeserving us tuition-paying students were of this incredible inconvenience. The five girls — me not included — braved the pitch-dark bathroom and turned their shower into a dance party.
In such close quarters, with hardly any means, technology serves as each and every one of our escapes from direct human interaction. And in the darkness, last Saturday, under the city fog and gloom, we talked instead of texted and sang favorite songs instead of listening to them. We transported to a time before social networks were an excuse to remain short and grammatically incorrect. We spoke with our mouths instead of our 60-word per-minute fingers. And in this moment we perhaps spoke for our generation, a generation that has been slammed for its supposed inability to speak.
When it comes to spiders, a majority of girls become paralyzed, but when it comes to a power shortage, the whole world stops. Our minds are ever-present, I don’t doubt, but if those baby-boomers want proof that their kids have still got it, I suggest they turn off the power. We can make good out of anything.
Haley Pearson is a freshmen industrial design major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
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