Leo's Blog For Journalism

I was homeschooled. For the majority of my life, I had few friends and most of them lived 45+ minutes drive away. The internet aided these relationships without a doubt. I talk to my best friend over the pandemic more often than I did before. I was able to communicate and coordinate with people from the local high school despite never attending there. These are examples of online and in-person contact working hand-in-hand to present the best possible outcome, but let's look examine my in-person and online interactions that don't have as much overlap. Something I dislike about the critiques of technology is how much they aggrandize in-person conversations as if they all were inherently valuable. I have conversations with people all the time, and I’ve discovered that it's very easy to find people boring. Extracting value from social interactions requires skill. You have to know what questions to ask, you have to probe, to get to the heart of their interests. At my current ski...

Technological overload is an issue I’ve become increasingly aware of in recent months, but how easy is it to resist? I tested this when my class gave me a week to complete the challenge of going without technology for 4 consecutive waking hours. I did not beat this challenge, but I did get some interesting information about how technology mediates my life. I’ve always known that technology has become deeply ingrained in our school system, but I never learned how much until this week. My assignments are online, my textbooks are online, my notes are online (more on this one later), and even some of my classes are online. There was only one assignment that could have been completed without a laptop, and even then it required note-taking, something which I am not accustomed to doing on paper. It's not that I never learned handwriting, but once I was introduced to the simplicity of the keyboard, it took a back-burner and got sloppier and sloppier. This is apparently becoming a problem ...