W9. Task d. Neo-Luddite

d) Describe the daily frustrations of a fictional neo-luddite at university now in the UK.

I think a neo-luddite would massively struggle in a modern university environment.

Firstly the entire application process and UCAS I believe is only available online, so this would be vastly complicated if he opposed to even doing this digitally! I think the main consequence would be that he wouldn’t be able to benefit from the immediacy of the Internet. For example, if he has a problem he wouldn’t be able to e-mail a tutor and get an immediate response, instead he’d have to go to their office, they might be busy, and of course he wouldn’t have a permanent record of their answer.

Another advantage he would be missing out on is digitality, the ability to continuously edit and re-edit work. Instead he’d have to even write out essays by hand, something which I can barely comprehend! Cross it out if it were wrong, re-write it if it weren’t neat enough, have a first and second draft, something I’m not used to since school given the convenience of being able to re-word and re-arrange an essay as I go.

However, the problems wouldn’t only be limited to academic issues; I believe they would intrude into his social life as well. How would he know what his friends were doing and where they were going for a drink that evening if it weren’t for Facebook? If he wanted to arrange a group meeting and went as far as to not approve of even mobile phones, how would someone let him know that they’d changed the date, time, place, or that they were going to be late? Or how would he ask his peers if a lecture were cancelled if he weren’t allowed to change his status? Or even let the girl he fancies know about it by poking her?!

Having considered the different ways which being a neo-luddite would hold someone back in a modern university environment, it has lead to me taking a more techno-determinist viewpoint. It is almost as if it is a force of nature, in that it is impossible to resist in today’s society, and actively doing so, as in the case of the neo-luddist, would lead to you missing out as a great deal of features of modern day life are dependant upon technology. It seems as if resisting the effects of technology does you more harm than good. I personally can’t see any logic behind being a neo-luddite!