The Last Media Fast I Will Ever Do

When I started this project, I was hoping for a little realization.  Maybe an understanding, or at worst, a mental breakdown.  I had no idea what was really in store for me. 

My plan was perfect, start the media fast off with a date.  Can’t use cellphones on a date anyways, not without looking like a tool.  A movie was obviously out, what about the hot springs?  It’d be a good way to escape media and still have fun.  First off, coordinating a date without a phone was impossible.  I eventually resorted to having my roommate text the girl for me.  I know that’s like having your atheist friend steal bubble gum for you because he’s already going to hell, but it’s the only way things could work.

Two hours later, we all clamper up to the lip of the hot springs, just as my flashlight begins to die.  I can already tell there’s a gang of people in one of the springs, laughing and splashing around like a bunch of amped up chimpanzees.  Quickly sliding my dying light across them, I try to see just how many people there are.  The light bounces back to my eye balls exposing a scene of pasty white naked bodies that will forever sear my darkest nightmares.  And then my flashlight dies.  I instinctively reach for my cellphone, all too remember it’s been safely locked away for the media fast.  So there I am, surrounded by darkness, in the middle of a nudist colony.

The group I’m with becomes impatient—what’s the hold up?  I try to whisper something about the nudies, but it comes out much too loud.  With nothing left to do, I slink over to the hot springs right next to the skinnies.  Trying to navigate around is terrible, as I pull off my shirt and shoes.  At one point, I end up falling into the nudist hot tube.  For my own sake, I pray it was only somebody’s arm I grabbed to stabilize myself.  Suddenly, I realize my sister knows where other hot springs are somewhere up river if I could just call her.  A wave of relief washes over me, quickly replaces by a titanic frost as I realize again,  I don’t have my phone.  And so, for what is probably the most awkward date I will ever have in my life, we sit in the dark, terrified to move as we listen to the bizarre laughter and splashing of a bunch of buck-naked libertarians.

I thought this experience would show me just how much power machines had in my life.  What I discovered is that the two are intertwined.  Not just with work, or school, but socially, emotionally, everything.  Machines are not our masters, nor are we their slaves.  They’re part of us, just like we are part of them.  Take away my cellphone and you’ve taken away a social element that’s infused with everything else I do socially.  We were never fighting the terminators after all, we were the terminators.

 

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