Computer-free students learn they can't live without them
— -- Caitlin Magnusson's laptop was on the top shelf of her closet, sealed in flowery wrapping paper, covered in duct tape and caged in a box.
But every morning she would wake up in her dorm room and still turn to her desk to reach for it. It had become muscular memory.
Capturing the experience of going without a computer — for Magnusson it was five weeks — is part of a documentary-making course at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. She and two other students who went on the "computer fast" are the documentary subjects; eight others took turns filming. When the documentary is finished, they plan to screen it on campus and submit it to film festivals.
Magnusson, of Renton, Wash., and the rest of the class discovered the intense influence computers have on their lives. Ditching them entirely is impossible, says Mitchell Lundin of Lakeville, Minn., who also went computerless. Giving up e-mail, Internet news and social networking sites, and relying on phones and print newspapers, rapidly became a burden, he says.
About 87% of 18- to 29-year-olds use the Internet, according to a 2007 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which studies Net use.
Those statistics reflect the perplexed looks and "You're crazy" remarks that Magnusson, 20, Lundin, 22, and Andrew Tatge, 20, got from their peers. Each student set a goal for how long they would go computerless. Lundin went for three weeks. Tatge, of Des Moines, went four.
For Magnusson, the fast was a roller coaster of emotions. At first she was proud, but when she was forced to use a typewriter and skip out on watching YouTube videos with friends, she experienced deep frustration, she says.
Lundin, who had pitched the idea to the class, saw it as a means to sift out the unnecessary. He had used instant messaging since 7th grade but now shuns it as "incredibly distracting."
Tatge is philosophical. "It hasn't changed how I look at things, but it challenged who I am," he says. He filled his free time with campus walks and drawing comics in a journal.
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