My friend had a pretty bad day today: she spilled hot coffee
onto her Macbook computer, effectively frying her server and leaving her
without a computer during one of the most stressful times of the school year,
finals time. When she texted what happened to a group chat of a couple friends,
everyone was pretty horrified, and rightly so, because in this day and age,
especially in college, I would say it is incredibly hard to get through school
without a personal computer. I personally have not met anyone who does not own
a laptop at WashU. From writing essays, taking notes on the computer, and completing
online assignments, much of our college academic life relies on having a
functional laptop. We were devastated for her because she had lost all her semester’s
work of essays and notes and was also left without a computer to finish the
rest of her work. This made me reflect on how important and relevant computers
have become in our education. Even just a few decades ago, computers were used
more for industrial use and only some households had one for the whole family. Now,
it is common for every member of a family to have a laptop (at least in the
socioeconomic class that WashU is situated within) and it has become so that it
is pretty hard to function at school, work, or society without one.
It would be interesting to read an anthropological article
or conduct one’s own ethnography on how technology has infiltrated and changed
the educational structures in modern day.
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