The two average student days described earlier were obviously imaginary yet to get an idea of the difference I tried to fit in all the media technology available 30 years ago. I find it hard to believe that my parents actually sat on the park with friends listening to pirate stations on a transistor radio; I think they were being a tad nostalgic. I often ask ‘How did you manage to socialise without a mobile phone?’ and they assure me that at times they would write letters arranging certain events. My dad received a pocket calculator for Christmas in 1974 and he was the first in his school to have one, within 25 years, mobile phones would include them as standard. The major difference between the hypothetical day in 1977 and in 2007 is that technology is significantly more mobile and accessible to more people today due to it being increasingly small and cheap. For instance all but one of my housemates has a TV in their room, whereas in 1977 students would go to the students union to watch something on TV if they didn’t have one. People often listen to music to pass time today or eliminate boredom. In the past people would be more likely to go out of their way to listen to their music e.g. by spending time in their room listening to records. I am not saying that people no longer relax by listening to music but there are much more opportunities to listen to music today and people spend less time listening to music alone in their bedroom. Technology has allowed a number of typical student activities become more practical. For instance a student today can easily use a voice recorder in lectures to go back to and take further notes from. When typing up an essay today, a student can erase mistakes with the touch of button whereas in the past, students would have to go through the process of amending mistakes with tip-ex. As well as this, most students had their own dictionaries from which to check spellings they were unsure of. Again using my housemates as an example, only two of us have bought dictionaries. To edit spelling and grammar one can simply hit a button and allow the computer to do it for us. This raises the question of whether or not students today are becoming less intelligent because of it. Do the various advantages of the 21st century student make for a less qualified, lazier individual? With lecture notes available online, are students as likely to turn up for a lecture knowing that if they miss it they can still access the notes? It has just occurred to me that I didn’t even mention the internet in the hypothetical day in 2007. This is probably because I have become so accustomed to it and simply take it for granted. The internet is a wonderful tool for students however again, does this advantage in some ways actually serve a negative side affect. Whilst a student would spend hours in the library trawling through information in 1977, a quick Google search can access similar information in seconds. This can be negative because students do considerably less reading than in the past and are learning less as a result of this. The internet, for all its fantastic advantages is all too often badly misused. With surveillance society one of the core concepts of the module, the debate surrounding monitoring of the internet is one which is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This is one of a number of examples which shows how technology can have both positive and negative impacts. There are probably thousands of pieces of work handed in to schools, colleges and universities every year which contain American spellings of words because many computers (including the one I am typing this up on in Pandon building) have an  U.S version of spell-check. One thing is clear however, there is little doubt that students of the 1970’s would have any hesitation in using the technology available today to aid their studies. Computers and the internet have made studying a much quicker process. It is somewhat amusing to look back on television and film representations in the 1970’s of the future as I am yet to see anyone wearing silver clothes or having a meal in pill form.