If you are moving into a residence hall on campus for the first time this fall, you are participating in a unique experience, especially if you hail from a small town in Iowa that doesn’t have access to high speed Internet. On the ISU Web site alone you can check your grades and your schedule; look up classmates and professors; and take tests on WebCT. On the rest of the Web, music, whole movies and even porn are just a click away.

But who would use the Internet to look up porn in the privacy of their room? There is no irony like using the most advanced processor chip technology available to satisfy your basest of animal needs.

Consider yourself somewhat lucky and somewhat cursed, because as Bob Dylan famously said in a song that I downloaded for free online, “times, they are a changin.'” Remember the subtle dance of chase and retreat you had to play with a cassette tape to find that one particular song you really liked? Now we have MP3 players that weigh a handful of ounces, never skip and give you instant access to more than 10,000 songs.

Don’t get me wrong — I love all the instant gratification. But no matter how much time you save, you’ll still find new ways to waste it. I don’t know about you, but whenever I catch a full day off, I usually spend it doing really important and meaningful things like watching TV or sleeping.

Technology will increase our access to new information and distant planets, save us time and money, but it never has and never will improve us on its own.

No matter how much stuff we have or the time we save, we will always be defined by how we use it.

The last time I checked, we were the most technologically advanced that human beings have ever been. But does that mean humans are the most advanced we have ever been?

Just because I could potentially send pictures of my newborn baby to my grandma like actors do on commercials doesn’t mean I will, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’ll care enough to take the pictures and actually send them.

I can see live footage of fighting in Iraq and cheer for an athlete in Athens whom I’ve never met, but it doesn’t mean I know the names of the people who live next door to me.

I can go online or see a DVD about deep space quasars that I’ll never see with my own eyes and still have no idea who happens to be my congressman. I could hop on a plane and be on another continent in a matter of hours and still have no idea what the immediate towns around Ames look like. The iPod has made carrying more songs than you even know around with you possible, but amazingly, people still listen to Ashlee Simpson.

This is the best we can do in getting news out to people, but have you noticed a significant drop in ignorance lately?

It seems that no matter how advanced our media become, we still cannot engineer a device that will make people care about anything other than what’s on the next channel.

That is the greatest myth about this bigger, better and faster society that we live in: The mass media and the overwhelming convenience of modern life make our daily decisions even more critical, not less so.