During the summer, we have the opportunity to leave our working week schedules of the Fall and Spring semesters and venture. Some of us are lucky enough to pursue our studies at the Capstone or local community colleges. A select few will score paying jobs or elite internships. Others will take vacations with family and friends, and many more will work on their own personalized couch indentions.
But regardless of our choice, the summer months are spent doing something other than the normal school year routine. We are given a chance to see, eat and do things outside of the University of Alabama, and most importantly, with people outside of the UA community.
For the first time since high school, I have the opportunity to have dinner with my family every night, an opportunity made impossible during the school year by the 723 miles between my campus and home. This summer, rather than have my weekends dominated by Alabama football, I can take leisurely trips to visit the beach, music festivals or friends.
Yet I am connected. Through Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and whatever else is used in the morphing world of social media, we are able to share every beautiful view, delicious dish and inside joke with our cyber friends. Instantly, our followers are kept up-to-date with summer details.
And while this is great, it cheapens the moments. Our intimate interactions are unleashed to hundreds of acquaintances, and we reflexively look through the camera lens of an iPhone, rather than the raw view of our own cornea.
A friend of mine recently went on his honeymoon. My Twitter feed was fed with pictures of the view from his hotel room window, funny quotes from his wife and complaints about traffic and travel. And while this was all very fascinating and received many thumbs up of support via retweets and “likes,” it completely defeated the purpose of a honeymoon, which is to spend time with your new spouse – alone.
Uploading photos from your hiking trip is one thing, but live-tweeting your entire encounter with nature is another. And this summer, many of us will spend more time on our phones, quoting conversation, than in actual conversation.
I love Twitter, Instagram is great, and I use my phone as a camera on a regular basis, but we must be wary of falling into the hole of cyber-world. Like Alice, we can lose ourselves in an attempt to form an online presence, obsessing over the creation of an ideal image by means of our social media posts. Striving to keep up-to-date on the world around us and then updating our own followers, we will actually miss the present.
The moments we are attempting to capture will be saved to a SIM card, but not to our cranial memory. And if you have tried to capture the beauty of a distant mountain range through a photo, then you understand the vanity of such an attempt.
Put your phone away, stop refreshing your Twitter feed, and re-accustom your eyes to sunlight and your ears to conversation. Use your summer months as a break from the normalcy of academic semesters, including your habitual procrastinatory Facebook checkups. Enjoy the experiences with those around you without feeling obliged to share them with those absent. Those experiences will mean much more if you have an actual emotion to associate with them.
SoRelle Wyckoff is the opinions editor of The Crimson White.
