The work I selected to relate to my memoir The Winter of our Disconnect, meaning the work had to relate to a loss or complete lack of technology or electricity, was a YouTube clip titled Life Without Technology at Temple University. Immediately, the video is in a black and white format and the audio disabled; the students who made it at Temple University designed it to look similar to a silent film from older days of society. The video shows a student in a life that seems to be completely screen free, and comments on the movie appear throughout the video. “It was dull, it was cold, it was quiet all of the time…” (0:41). This quote describes the atmosphere of the students life without technology. Using adjectives like dull and quiet, the video is demonstrating that, contrary to Maushart’s experiment, life without technology is not the best kind of life.
Images of students seemingly being confused and having a hard time finding a book in a library without a search engine computer available to direct you to where the book is located, giving an example of how technology makes things simpler, faster, and easier for everyone that can use it. This relates to Maushart’s memoir in an opposite way; Maushart’s memoir had a general theme of a life that was more peaceful and a family that got along and did things together much more often than they would with technology, putting Maushart’s position on the matter against a constant technological life. This video by students at Temple University seems to have the perspective from the other side; before even the basic technology, things were long, boring and challenging: “For this slow-paced work flow was driving everyone insane…” (1:09). This quote is stated in a time of the video when students seem to be having a challenging time at doing their work in the library, scanning book after book looking for the right one.
The ending clip is of students discovering technology for seemingly the first time, and suddenly the video has switched from black and white to color. The last few seconds show students working together and having a good time in a conference room with a big television and computer. Again, the views are opposite and the theme and tone of my memoir and this video clip are, for the most part, against each other. Although Maushart did not believe that technology was a bad thing, she simply believed that being sucked in to it like most people do is not living life with technology to the fullest. Overall, both the video and the book demonstrate how technology makes a huge impact on our lives, negative or positive.
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