Last fall, I spent a long, regrettable night working on a term paper in Uris Library. Around 9 a.m., I stumbled out to the parking lot, opened my car door, placed my laptop on the roof so I could throw my backpack in the passenger seat and drove away. Without the laptop. It wasn’t until much later that day, when I’d finally awoken from my slumber and checked my e-mail in a friend’s room, that I realized the horrible fate of my computer. I’d received a message from the Cornell police saying that somebody had witnessed the deceased laptop fly off the roof of my car and smash against the pavement. The phantom witness apparently knew me, but decided, for some reason, to hand the battered device over to the police rather than issue me the bad news directly. I spent the next few weeks evading phone calls from my father and concocting ridiculous explanations of how I managed to demolish my MacBook, which was so badly damaged that not even its hard drive could be salvaged.

Absolutely nothing good came of this incident, except that it provided an apt metaphor for my growing distaste for technology. Recently, I’ve become more and more disallusioned by “technological advancement” and its various complexities and intrusions on my daily routine. Sure, the laptop was great for writing essays in the library and consolidating class material in a single space, but now everything was gone — resumes, old papers, thousands of illegally download songs and a hilarious photo of me “pantsing” my friend at a New Year’s party. All vanished into nonexistence. (By the way, please do not send me any facetious e-mails telling me I should have backed my hard drive up on a disk, because that isn’t the point.)

For thousands of years, humans have relied on tools to make their daily lives more efficient. In Paleolithic times, this probably meant basic utensils for grinding up food or large stone objects for striking enemies. Today, we have the Internet, nuclear reactors and the spork. In modern generations, “technological advancement” seems to bring about economic or social progress, or some combination of the two and the thought of life without computers or cell phones is unimaginable.

But when does “progress” become a hindrance? Can technology — if taken too far — actually detract from one’s quality of life? At the very least, I think we are too reliant. Most of you have probably lost your cell phone at least once — in my case, once a month. You probably recall an empty, hopeless feeling of disconnectedness. Certainly technology can work wonders in medicine and science, but what about our daily lives?

Consider the impact of technology on communication. The great part about cell phones and the Internet is that we can communicate with almost anybody at almost any time. But people undoubtedly get carried away. A few days ago I was walking up the slope to the Arts Quad and I counted five people talking on cell phones within a 50-yard radius. More frustrating is the idea that most social conversation via modern media is gratuitous and entirely unnecessary. On top of that, it is often annoying to people around you. It seems like every time I use public transportation I’m subjected to the girl in front of me complaining to a friend 100 miles away about some stupid comment a guy posted on her Facebook wall referencing an illicit instant message exchange that occurred last week.

On that note, I’ve become increasingly startled by the proportion of our socialization that occurs over the Internet. The fact is, today’s college generation is the first that socialized through instant messaging throughout their entire childhood. Doesn’t this detract from actual, real-life socializing? Every minute spent jabbering away to HotChixx87 in virtual reality is a minute lost of communicating with somebody directly, face to face — a minute of experiencing the real world. Sometimes we even use IMs to intentionally avoid actual interaction, like in middle school when I was too afraid to actually talk to the hot girl in person. One day somebody will produce statistics concerning how many hours per-week our generation spends communicating over the Internet, and I promise you the number will be staggering. We may even look back and regret wasting our youthful days talking to people that, in a sense, weren’t actually there.

The latest Internet craze — Facebook — has allowed the average young person not simply to sustain long-distance friendships, but to actually live out a great deal of their social lives online. Today I logged onto my account for the first time in a while and was bombarded by a long list of puzzling notices: four “friend requests,” seven “event invitations,” 40 “group invitations,” one “wall post request,” one “pet invitation,” two “pirate invitations,” one “top friend request,” one “Entourage invitation,” a “sticky note request” and finally, a “cause invitation.” Tell me that’s not getting out of hand. Oh, and I also received a few pokes, though I have yet to understand what exactly those mean.

Apparently, Facebook is a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Ironically, like much of modern communication, it seems to also do the opposite. After all, if you are using Facebook then you are at your computer, which means you are probably alone and not interacting with people at all. Those who spend enough time on Facebook to create groups and send bizarre invitations to each other must be missing out on something. Could it be … reality?

Ben Notterman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at bnotterman@cornellsun.com The Scorpion King appears alternate Fridays.