I have recently noticed that I frequently use my phone as a way of escaping awkward or uncomfortable social situations. This came to my attention today when my schedule did not align with those of my friends, leaving me to eat lunch by myself in Proctor. Though I know  eating meals solo is not a big deal- in fact, most people at Midd have done so at some point or another- I cannot help but feel uncomfortable as I observe everyone else eat lunch with their friends. Somewhat unconsciously, I munched on my tomato, basil, and goat cheese sandwich while scrolling through uninteresting text messages and Facebook updates. Why did I feel the need to have my phone out a time like this? Why couldn’t I proudly sit by myself and enjoy my delicious sandwich? Perhaps I was trying to suggest to the strangers around me that I was simply too cool and too busy to have lunch with friends. Whatever the reason and however stupid it may be, in that moment, having my iPhone as my lunch buddy made me feel more secure.

For some spontaneous reason, I deleted my Facebook on Tuesday. Instead of planning to do it and making excuses not to, I just did it. Since this summer, I’ve wanted to retest my ability to stay off the site but made excuses like, “I’m going to a new place” “I need it for college” “I’ll be meeting tons of new people,” when actually I’ve been trying to limit the ways that technology negatively affects my day to day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Facebook is a great tool. During my travels, I posted a lot about what I was up to and caught up with friends from home on how college was going. It was a great way to share photos and experiences with the people I love from far away and was almost the only way that I kept in touch with people from home. Still, now, Facebook can be an awesome tool to make connections and to plan get togethers or events. But I want to test the experience of not having Facebook in college. I have a phone now and everyone who would contact me through Facebook has my number, as I have theirs, and any event that I should attend at such a small school like Middlebury I will hear about from friends or from other news.

Others may think that deleting Facebook is pointless. You can definitely control your use of Facebook so that it doesn’t interfere with how you interact with people one on one, but it also encourages social competitiveness when you do get online. I found myself making sure I was tagged in certain photos a couple weeks ago and then asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” The answer, though many people may try to cover it up with excuses or alternate explanations, is that Facebook brings out the materialistic side of all of us. The reason we want to share photos and get tagged is because we want other people to see what we are doing. I’m not going to lie to myself anymore. I was being superficial, and I don’t want superficiality to be one of my values.

Facebook, I think, is a tricky thing. It’s great for many, many reasons. I will miss out on those random Facebook encounters where people seek me out or vice versa due to some random connection, and then we actually share information and thoughts on which we can expand. I will miss getting random messages from people at home, but that just means I can either call them, text them, or just have a great conversation in 2 weeks when I see them next. Facebook is great for many reasons, but it also affects how we think and the things we care about. In deleting my Facebook, I want to see whether the benefits outweigh the takeaways. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I’ve promised myself to at least make it till after finals.

I don’t agree, in principle with online education. It definitely has its place in expanding access to education and serving as a supplemental tool to help students graduate on time, but I think the value of teacher-student interactions is too high to give up. Our traditional education at Middlebury, however, has already incorporated a lot of elements native to online education. We turn in papers online, take exams online, and rely on online sources to complete assignments. I was thinking about this in terms of the end of the fall term. I have an online exam, a paper to be turned in online, and one paper that has to be turned in in person. If it weren’t for the paper that has to be turned in as a hard copy, I would be able to leave as soon as my last class ends on Friday at 10 AM. If the temporal structure (in terms of using Moodle for assessment, and turning in papers via Moodle) that most of my classes have started using were utilized curriculum-wide, I would be able to go home. But more importantly, uniformity would give students an equal and predictable expectation for their work.

The problem right now is that every class approaches media differently. One of my classes has no online presence whatsoever, while one of my classes’ homework is all turned in via Moodle. This means that every assignment I turn in is not just turned in on a different subject, but also in a different temporal form. I’m not incompetent so I can handle it, but it’s a distraction from the actual work. A standardized system would allow students to focus on content rather than worrying about what form each assignment has to take, not to mention the fact that it would allow students to plan their vacations more easily.