Ashley Austin Page editorCollege students often move away from home to attend school. The lines of communication between students and parents can seriously decline during the first few months of living away from home.
Thanks to technology, there are many different ways college students can keep in touch with family and friends while away at school.
With such busy school and activity schedules, most students rely on technology as their main form of communication. The instantaneous results of modern conveniences such as text messaging and e-mail are ideal for the fast-paced lifestyle of the typical college student. Prior to 1876 the only means of communication between family members not living in the same place was letter writing. This archaic process involved
actually sitting down, putting pen to paper and scribing characters to form words that describe thoughts. Impressive, right?
The inception of the telephone brought about an entire communications revolution. A person living in one part of the country could speak directly to a person living somewhere entirely different at the same time. The art of letter writing began to die slowly with the first rings of progress in the communications realm.
About 125 years after the telephone was introduced, along came the World Wide Web. This communication superhighway allowed for instant access to a multitude of information. More importantly, it brought back the long lost art of letter writing sort of. E-mail created a need for people to put thoughts into written words and send those words through the Internet to another person. This process is similar to old-fashioned letter writing, but instantaneous.
The most common forms of communication between college students and family members are through the phone and Internet. It is now common for students and parents alike to be members of social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. These mediums allow each party to view the otherís profile without even having to communicate directly to that person.
Like most college campuses, KC offers Internet access to students and free use of campus computer labs. Even students who donít have a personal computer can utilize these resources to communicate with family and friends through e-mail, social networking Web sites or instant messaging.
Some students may find it weird to see their parents, siblings or even grandparents as members of social networking Web sites. The fear lies in the thought that most students think the relative is keeping tabs on their day-to-day activities when, in reality, they are probably spending more time communicating with their own friends than they are stalking their student.
Text messaging has become one way that college students communicate with relatives instantaneously. One quick text can speak volumes. For instance, most mothers would love receiving a simple ìgood morningî text just to let them know that their child woke up that day. Quick questions are often best answered with text messages. Cutting out the day-to- day chit-chat that occurs when making a phone call is just one way students make their busy days less stressful.
While text messaging, Internet communication and phone conversations are the quickest and most technologically advanced forms of communications available today, nothing beats a handwritten letter. Taking the time to sit down and create words with ink produces a permanent and tangible object of unmatched value.
Ashley Austin is a sophomore communication major from Pasadena. She is writing a weekly column providing advice on how to have a successful college career.
I thought it was very interesting how not only did she describe how we stay in contact now, but also wrote about how people kept in contact back in the day. It was very interesting to think about how much we use technology today and how easy it is to stay in contact with people across the globe.