Man has a new best friend. Spot may be able to catch and return a tennis ball, but I'm willing to bet that you can't throw him a word and have him bring back 3,482,976 pages of information on it. Rover may nuzzle your leg when you're blue, but he probably doesn't sing you your entire collection of Sarah McLachlan albums in one sitting. Fido may even be the best listener in the world, but you can't blog on him (I guess this is where the analogy dies). For the 21st century, Lassie has been replaced by the laptop.
Between e-mail, AIM, questionable Google searches, iTunes, and Facebook, your laptop is your portable confidante, nourisher, and therapist. You are hopelessly lost without it. To college students who are adjusting to a new home and life, their laptops are their surrogate mothers. We hold it by the hand wherever we go and don't allow ourselves to cross the streets of college academia and socializing without it. How do we learn about the world? How do we become acquainted with people? How do we find ourselves? What is the meaning of life? Those who are old-fashioned might suggest "reading books," "talking to people," "thinking," "love," or other such antiquities. The modern answer is: "laptop."
That being said, it's been an hour since I wrote that last paragraph. In that hour, I've checked my e-mail approximately five times (keep in mind I have the iBook Mail program that automatically "bweeps" when you have a new message, but it can't hurt to check, right?). I've also: gone on Facebook twice, filled in the blank spaces in my iTunes library a few times (someday, I might want to know what album "Shake That" is on!), read e-mails I sent to my parents a year ago, e-mailed people I know perfectly well I could have just called, changed my desktop picture, and run my finger across the finger/mouse-pad-thingy so I could watch the cursor dart back and forth.
I think you smell what I'm stepping in here. Our laptops cause us to lose our sensibilities. I've lost hours to activities that, upon retrospection, look completely absurd; staying up until three o'clock in the morning is kind of a large price to pay to get to the "Evil" level on websudoku.com, after all. And, looking back on it, it probably wasn't really worth going to both foodtv.com and the Godiva Chocolatier website to find a fudge brownie recipe worth committing homicide for. I don't even own a pan. Simply having my laptop near me causes my rational thinking to come to a screeching halt. I start to shop for shoes I can't afford, Google people I've never met, develop a solitaire mastery that I certainly don't need, and dedicate to these futile activities hours that I really don't have.
But in some sense, what choice is there in the matter? E-mail is the foremost and easiest way to communicate important information with one another. Music has become so easily transportable that some find it difficult to function without it. Some economics professors have begun putting interactive problem sets online. And, of course, there's the issue of writing papers, a slightly less glamorous use for laptops, but necessary nonetheless. Unless you want to duct tape yourself to a chair in Kanbar, a laptop is simply the easiest and best way to get things done.
But this, of course, does not solve the natural desires that any 20-year-old college student experiences: the urge to procrastinate. No matter how much you try to repress or deny it, there's no way to escape from the ever-so cunning thought that "I have plenty of time." If it's not due in the next five hours, it can be put off. And being the clever, resourceful Bowdoin students that we are, we'll find just about any means possible to do this. If you've lasted as far as you have into this article, in fact, you're probably looking to put something off.
But nothing suits this need as well as a laptop. Bowdoin itself has even encouraged this with recent developments. Wondering what the temperature is outside? Check the student gateway. What's for dinner? Dashboard. What was in dinner? Thorne now has the nutrition facts online. Is my laundry done? Look at laundryview.com (and pay 25 cents extra, but that's for another article). The slightest whim of curiosity can be immediately satisfied by a laptop.
So here we have our generation's biggest challenge: How can we proceed to functional and effective adults using possibly the most anti-productive tool known to man? Can we have webcam business conferences using the same instrument that intrigues us with YouTube? Can we write proposals with the very same item that keeps us spellbound with online Scrabble? Daunting questions, all of these. But if you're anything like myself, you haven't had time to ponder them; you've been too busy watching Borat clips.