What Happens When You Unplug a College Student?

The students, all 200 of them, hooted and hollered when the professor announced the assignment. "I can't do that!" they cried. "I'm too addicted!" Turns out they were right.

After agreeing to spend 24 hours unplugged to any media, the students blogged (of course!) about the experience. The consensus pretty much boiled down to :-(. Walking around without a cell phone in hand, earbud in ear or Facebook near face forced the students into all sorts of weird, uncomfortable situations, such as ... talking to people.

"They started talking to people at the bus stop. Or they went across the campus to visit a sick friend who they never would have visited in person; they would've texted," says Susan Moeller, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, which conducted the study.

Horrors! They actually ended up visiting a sick friend? Yes, Moeller says, and that's not all. "It seems like a total no-brainer that somebody with earbuds is not somebody you're going to stop and have a conversation with because you assume they're not listening to you." But this no-brainer stunned students in reverse. When they took their earbuds out for a day, they found themselves talking to far more people and having far more in-depth conversations than before. With friends! With strangers!

The students really had had no idea that the fact that they walk around with the electronic equivalent of fingers in their ears is a disincentive to deep talks. Meanwhile, in another revelation, some students reported hearing the birds chirping on campus for the very first time.

But if the students were shocked by all the new things they found themselves experiencing — things most of us adults call "normal life" — adults may be shocked to realize how absolutely "Little House on the Prairie" our lives seem to the college generation.

It's not just that they have to be online to talk with friends or have to text when they want to make plans.

(Knocking on your dorm mate's door is so 1988!) What is also strange is how utterly helpless they feel without an electronic communication device in hand.

"People were surprised that their geographic and mental boundaries shifted," Moeller says. In other words, without a cell phone, some were afraid to walk across campus; they couldn't call for help! Others were scared to drive; what if they ran out of gas? The idea that they could ever fend for themselves — or weren't always in peril — didn't seem to occur to them. Starting across town with only a backpack full of books was like starting out West with only a wagon full of mule chow.

There's been a lot of talk about how the cell phone and its social media cousins keep kids constantly connected and entertained, but that's not the big deal. The big deal is that they actually give young people the courage to do the things that we used to expect them to grow up to do on their own. Walk. Talk. Date. Drive.

Take away the students' devices and there goes their confidence. So the cell phone isn't just an electronic amusement park. It's electronic beer.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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