Is This Real Life?

As the school year winds down, lectures tend to get more important. We’re given final exam reviews, important hints and instructions for essays and assignments, and so on. This isn’t to say that lectures aren’t important throughout the year; quite the contrary actually. I find that going to lectures genuinely helps me gain a better grasp of the material, rather than sitting in my room by myself reading lecture slides or the textbook.

As this is my final year of university, I have yet to understand one thing about certain students: why bother coming to lecture if you’re not going to listen? Trust me, I’m no saint when it comes to surfing the Internet here and there when I get a little bored. My mind wanders, and I need to take a little break from paying attention. I allow myself at least that, and once I’ve satisfied my Internet-roaming ways, I pull up my notes and continue listening.


A fellow peer of mine has urged me to write this blog post. I do not know her name. I know nothing about her. She often sits next to me in lectures (she is in two of my courses), and not a lecture goes by where she is not constantly connected to some form of social-networking.

She never pulls up a single page of notes on her laptop. Instead, she writes to people on Facebook, chats with friends on MSN while she browses the Internet, and keeps her Blackberry at her side so she can text and use BBM. Worse yet, each time I have witnessed this, her and I have been sitting in the front row of the classroom, in visible sight of the Professor lecturing.

First of all random girl, why come to class? If all you’re going to do is NOT pay attention, couldn’t you be doing that in the comfort of your own home? You don’t need to inconvenience yourself with walking all the way to campus so that you can not listen to what the Professor has to say.
Secondly, you are ruining a good thing for everyone who owns laptops and likes taking notes on them. Random girl, you are the reason Professors want people with laptops sitting in front rows or to get rid of them altogether. You are single-handedly creating a stereotype for all laptop users out there.
And lastly, you are paying for these lectures – don’t you care?


I suppose at the end of the day, none of this is really my business; it’s her choice whether she participates or not. But that’s just the issue now, isn’t it? Participatory culture and social-networking has seeped its way into our everyday lives, ultimately distracting us from the things we should actually be doing and caring about. Will she remember what she talked about on MSN in a few days? Probably not. But when exam time rolls around, will she regret not taking notes in lecture all those times? I’d have to say most definitely. It comes down to whether we think social-networking takes precedence over the “important things” in life – the things that happen in “real life”, so to speak, as opposed to our online life.

Is social-networking ruining the way things ought to be? Is there a right and wrong time to be connected to this participatory age? Let me know if you share my frustrations.

Oh, and P.S. – “random girl” isn’t in our class, so you can all rest easy, I would never rant about you guys :)