By Daniel Seim
In my hour of mediated time, I experienced quite a lot. I spent the first roughly 20 minutes watching the AFC Championship football game, during which I observed quite a bit about team sports. This included that being in the lead of a game could potentially cause a player to play “safer” and thus worse. I also saw that miscommunication can lead to frustration and anger between teammates which impacted their ability to perform. During the game I also saw a few commercials and advertisements. These included multiple Bet MGM commercials for sports betting featuring Jamie Foxx. There was also a Subway commercial featuring Steph Curry and Serena Williams which was obviously appealing to the sports fans watching the game. There was an advertisement for the first ever all electric chevy Silverado is being released, marking another step in the shift towards a carbon neutral world. Cool sculpting is advertised, a method of targeted fat loss that I do not know much about but am not sure is healthy or even works. The last 40 minutes of my hour were spent scrolling various platforms, Instagram, news websites, and twitter. In this time, I learned a good bit. Joe Biden is close to finalizing his pick for the supreme court after his campaign promise to nominate the first African American woman to the supreme court. I also learned that Great Britain as stated it will begin to supply Ukraine with anti-tank weapons to deter a Russian invasion. Also in international relations, I saw that Pakistanis can now travel to Qatar without a visa. In pop culture, I learned that How I Met Your Father is debuting on Hulu, marking the release of the spinoff series of the beloved How I Met Your Mother and Kanye West, now known as Ye, is releasing his second album on February 22nd, 2022. I was also informed that some areas in the northeast were slammed with as much as 30 inches of snow falling in some areas.
In my hour unplugged, or unmediated time, there were just as many experiences, but very different types of them. To begin my hour in nature, I immediately noticed the number of birds that were in the riverbed I had found by my house. There were more birds in this one area than I had perhaps seen in the last year easily. There was a blue jay living up to its aggressive species stereotype. The biodiversity of birds in this one riverbed was pleasantly surprising. In my hour, I noticed a blue jay, a cardinal, a woodpecker, a hawk, and 3 different types of songbirds. The male cardinals were seemingly competing for a single female’s attention, which left me chuckling about how similar their actions are to humans. The stream that is the remnants of a river was frozen solid straight through, and if left me wondering how thick ice needs to be to safely walk on it. I began to think about halfway through about how all of this had been roughly 700 feet from my bed for the last 8 months and I had never known it because I hadn’t taken the time to look. I got up at this point to move to a different location in the riverbed when I spotted a deer walking about a quarter mile away. I followed it at a distance as to not spook it and to my surprise I spotted a whole family of 7 or 8 deer hiding away. I tried my best to keep a distance out of respect and not wanting to scare them or make them run away. This led me to start thinking about how my very presence to them could spell life or death which is why they were so cautious of my movements. This was a super cool experience as I had no clue that such large animals were living so close to where I do. Deer are not necessarily the most interesting creatures on the planet but there is some beauty to seeing wild ones roaming around living their lives. I tried to continue to follow their movements out of curiosity but they disappeared seemingly out of nowhere. I then remembered that deer coats are designed to disappear into this type of forest and it left me impressed with the efficiency of the camouflage.
This experience was genuinely one of the best assignments I’ve been given as a student. It combined critical thinking, environmental science, and a bit of psychology. It really made me realize simply how reliant I am on my phone and other mediated sources. As McKibben said in his book, neither of these lifestyles are the perfect model for a happy lifestyle. These two hours showed widely different ways of experiencing the world and gaining knowledge. The best path for anyone in my opinion to move forward is to really think about each experience and what you gained from it. Evaluate what you gained from both and strike a balance with both elements in it. The hour I spent in the riverbed just watching and observing was one of the more peaceful times I have had in a very long time. It reminded me that “unplugging” and taking time to truly just yourself is extremely important. You cannot just go off the grid in today’s society. There was important information gleaned from my time online that I would have simply missed had I been offline in the woods. While most of what I learned in my hour that was recorded was quite frankly useless, some of it was quite useful in my future and can be applied in various contexts. The best way to learn from this assignment for me is to strike a balance between time plugged in versus time unplugged. Both have their benefits and as addicted as society is to their phones and mediated environments, we need to learn to unplug from each other and simply exist as ourselves and see the world for what it is. You might learn more by reading less.