Down to the Wire

Winthrop B11 has experienced an exodus of chilling proportions.

Our common room has been virtually abandoned in favor of the stairwell, and not because of cockroaches, leaks, or any of the other endearing quirks that characterize Harvard’s lovely river houses. We’re out there because there’s no wireless internet inside of our suite.

My suitemates and I are not alone in the experience of not getting wireless internet in the room. We are, perhaps, unique in the fact that we now live under the router in the hallway.

Wireless internet is either slow, erratic, or simply nonexistent at river houses (unless you wed yourself to your entryway’s router). The College’s explanation for this phenomenon is that the wireless network is experiencing unexpected overuse, and they believe that the problem will be fixed by October. The delay is, to say the least, quite inconvenient.

But what is more unsettling is the flabby lack of resourcefulness that this situation has revealed in students at the (second) best university in the world. I too have been afflicted with a sort of wireless-induced intellectual sloth. Unable to log onto Facebook from bed last night, I was forced to begin the reading for my Social Studies tutorial. Rousseau argues that man in his developed state is no match for man in his state of nature, untainted by tools. Our temporary wireless troubles reveal how dependence on technology has made us lazy and reluctant to do things the old-fashioned way.

I found myself more willing to gripe about the wireless than to walk the five minutes to the Science Center to pick up a hub. I stressed about picking my classes without the aid of my.harvard.edu, until I took my hard copy of the Courses of Instruction and the CUE guide out of the fireplace, where I was using them for kindling. And whining about how hard it would be to get in touch with my whole blocking group at once seemed ridiculous once I remembered that the convenience of email is really no better than using my red phone (free!) or walking upstairs (a good way to avoid the “Sophomore Thirty”).

Having wireless internet grants us the privilege of being able to check our email from the bathroom (among other conveniences), but its lapse is a blessing in disguise. It may help us realize that many things we take as necessities are actually luxuries. For now, I’m going to relax about the lack of wireless in my suite, and resort to some of those quaint traditions of yesteryear.

But if it’s not fixed by October, I’m transferring to the Quad.



Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.