Hey, did you hear about this? Apparently India and Pakistan have nuclear capabilities and are going to destroy the world. Weird, huh? And did you hear the one about Microsoft? Something happened, I'm not sure what. And don't even get me started on my favorite sports teams is the football season over yet? How are the Broncos doing?
When I heard about the "college bubble" before coming to Dartmouth, I thought to myself, "After years of watching the 10 o'clock news almost every night, there's no way I'm going to let myself suddenly become ignorant of what's happening outside Hanover, especially considering I'll be going to school in such a hotspot of international news." I can say now, however, with 100 percent certainty, that I have never known less about world affairs than I do right now, and that includes the three years I spent in a coma in the late '80s. The biggest international news in the past month has been Phi Delt's derecognition and Rex Dwyer's CS4 class, right?
College, the defining step in your graduation to the "real world" (an entity which, as far as I can tell, is just something they made up to scare kids into applying to college), actually completely isolates you from the world so that you can be thrown into it after four years, naked as the day you were born, with the challenge of adapting yourself to a world about which you know nothing. This seems to me an ironic role being played by an institution that's expected to help us become intricate cogs in the operation of the real world.
And all the blame for the fact that we grow more and more ignorant every day can be placed squarely on the lack of television. The boob tube is ironically what keeps us apprised of world event -- after all, who's willing to take the initiative to type in "cnn.com" in your web browser when you could, with much less effort, have your eyes glaze over, staring at a TV and letting it tell you all you need to know? Not me! And people say that TV is the bane of society. Not having easy access to quality TV programming (with the obvious exception of DTV) has made me as dumb as a doornail with regard to the latest news (although I do have a profoundly developed understanding of just about every culture and language on the face of the planet now).
So, theoretically, the new TV being set up in Thayer and our extended cable beginning in the fall should have me shouting from the rooftops, right? Not exactly. The new access to TV may bring us out of the cold we're experiencing now, but maybe this little bubble of ours isn't such a bad thing after all
I'd never felt so liberated until I came here. That doesn't just mean freedom from my parents; my mom still calls me fairly often. It does mean freedom from TV and freedom from feeling obligated to keep up with the news. I'm remaining happily ignorant and enjoying myself, absorbing college as much as I can without letting outside nuisances taint the experience. I'll readily admit that I probably watched a good three hours of TV a day at home; I've reduced that to about an hour a week now. There's an infinite number of ways that time could be better spent, whether or not it's being spent in paying attention to the outside world or not.
I've also been a longtime advocate of "happier" news. Not to say I can't deal with reality, but when half the news is consumed by weather and sports and the other half by crime and corruption, it leads one to develop a cynical outlook on the world. I've felt myself become so much happier and more optimistic since I've been here (hence, a couple dormmates nicknaming me Happy Dan), and I owe that largely to the fact that all the problems with reality aren't bearing down upon me wherever I go. We have a nice little utopia here and it would be a shame to have it corrupted by reality. There will be plenty of time for that when we graduate, but as for me, I'm going to enjoy the time I have here.
We can all function wonderfully without knowing about what happens "out there." Heck, the East Coast bubble has functioned fine without having a clue about anything west of the Mississippi, a shocking discovery that I had to get used to when I came here. But I've adapted and found my place in this bubble, and I trust myself to be able to adapt to life outside the bubble when I graduate without having my present happiness infiltrated by the devil that is the real world. So when we get our 60 channels in the fall -- 45 of which I assume will not be in English -- you may still find me watching the German channel. Whatever happens to Microsoft will happen, but I won't know about it -- I don't speak German.
