If you look at the social interaction styles of UT students today and ten years ago, they are vastly different. In today’s student environment, we head home after a long day and turn on our computers. Almost instantly, IM opens up connecting us to many of our friends who are online at the same time. We then turn to Facebook and are able to see what new is going on in everyone’s life.
We connect to the acaedemic world through Blackboard and e-mail.
All this while sitting at home.
Ten years ago, it would have been possible to use e-mail, if you were one of the people who add one of the very first accounts. Perhaps grad students? I’m not sure if undergrads had university e-mail accounts. Even if they did, you could only check it if you had Internet access and it is most likely that you had to be on campus to do that or perhaps use UT’s old dial-in Telesys network. I’m not sure of when each of these things came online so I could be completely off.
Without the Internet, establishments like Spyderhouse or Metro or JP Java’s or any of the number of coffee shops around Austin surely saw an increase of patrons. Libraries would have many more people slaving away trying to finish a report.
While the Internet opens up a world of information to us and can aid us in multi-tasking different projects- I’m switching back and forth from writing this and writing an e-mail now- it also greatly reduces our actual time of face-to-face social interaction.
For example, in a class I’m about to drop (no worries- I’m taking 17 hours and I’m reducing that load to 14), we are assigned to various groups. Long ago, these had to meet in person to work on various assignments. Through meeting, you’re able to actually meet them and find out more about them. Today, all group work is done online and since the class is so large, I have no idea who in this class are these group members I am supposed to work with. Since we’ll never meet in person, I’ll learn nothing more about them besides their thoughts on sociological theory.
Well, I could Facebook them.
But, if I just Facebook them, I only see one aspect of them. I only see what they think of themselves and only what they want other people to see. Some of the best friendships are developed through sometimes seeing other people not at the top of their game and this new online world redues the chances for that.
In a related post, I speak of how technology is starting to control us and how we must prevent this from happening. This point is very true in social interaction. We can slowly remove ourselves from the physical society and attempt to exist almost only in the virtual world.
Speaking of, the professor just wanted in. Time to get back to the physical world.

In PA 326, Intro to the Non-Profit Sector, we are supposed to find and work 35 hours over the semester in a non-profit. While 35 hours doesn’t seem like that much, the more I look at my calendar, the more I am unsure how I’ll be able to do that.
I’m going to speak with the professor today after class and figure out if I can count any of the things I already do, but since she wants 35 hours for the same entitiy, I don’t know.

For STS 321, we were asked to record a “media log” of how we interact with media over a course of a day. Here are my results:
Thursday is not a good day for me to do a media log. I’m in class from 8 a.m until 12:15 p.m. with no break, except today I overslept and missed my first class. I grab lunch and go to work. I send some e-mails and am currently working on a large-scale database migration. I head back to class and then come home early, as the STS 321 class is cancelled.
I ended up going to sleep very late last night and I’m still tired, so I come home and take a short nap. Then I do a little reading, with no TV or radio, followed by a visit to the gym with my roommate. I get back home and spend a couple of hours on the phone. While on the phone, the discussion included some facts that required verification. I checked out a couple of web sites and looked up an old e-mail to check.
The hour struck 12 and the media log turned back into a pumpkin.
In short, on Thursdays, I’m isolated. Short of work and my nightly phone routine, I stay in my own world. On MWF, I engage more with the world. I stop by Wikipedia and sometimes edit an article or two and I’ll watch a little TV after work. I’ll read a hard copy of The Daily Texan and the soft copy of a few newspapers. But, on Thursdays, I’m isolated.