WPE Sample Topic 3
The sample reading passage below is followed by a writing prompt.
Reading Passage
Adapted from “Learning to Let Go: First, Turn off the Phone”
By Andy Isaacson in The New York Times, December 14, 2012
Four years ago, Levi Felix was living in Los Angeles, pulling 70-hour weeks for a tech start-up. His lifestyle had become a high-tech cliché: laundry, late-night Thai food and Ping-Pong at the office. He slept with his laptop tucked under his pillow.
His over-caffeinated vision of “changing the world” was taking a toll. In 2009, before the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Tex., Mr. Felix checked in at a hospital, en route to the airport, for an IV. He said doctors found that his blood level was 70 percent below normal. “The doctor said: ‘You’re killing yourself. You need to take a break,’ ” Mr. Felix said.
So he did. For the next two years, Mr. Felix and his girlfriend, Brooke Dean, traveled abroad. They lived on farms, volunteered at nonprofits, surfed and fished. “We wanted to go off the grid and see what made people happy and how communities were living,” he said. They stumbled on a secluded guesthouse on a Cambodian island, and the owner eventually let them run it for six months. Watching how device-free living affected their guests inspired the couple. “We saw their faces change color,” he said.
When they returned to the United States, Mr. Felix and Ms. Dean encouraged friends to stash their mobile phones when they dined together. One friend, a director at Myspace who had visited them in Cambodia, suggested that they open a retreat closer to home. “’You have to bring what you gave me on the island to people who can’t fly and spend thousands of dollars to get away,’” Mr. Felix remembered his friend saying.
Last summer, the couple began four-day weekend retreats called the Digital Detox, held in various locations in Northern California. Participants surrender all their devices and are taught yoga, meditation and healthy cooking. “We give them the space to re-evaluate their relationship with technology and question the patterns in their lives,” he said. “We realized people need permission to fully get away and, we say, reformat their own personal hard drives.”
Many participants leave feeling transformed. Jonathan Lally, 28, who attended a Digital Detox retreat in June after leaving his job at Google, said he no longer brings his smartphone into the bedroom at night. “I use an old-school alarm clock that you need to wind up,” he said. “If people want to reach me after 9, they have to call me twice within two minutes — that’s the only way the phone lets them through.”
The retreat also made Mr. Lally more attentive in person. “If you were talking to me six months ago,” he said, “I probably would have pulled my phone out 30 times during this conversation.”
Recognizing that not everyone can get away, Mr. Felix and Ms. Dean wanted to bring the lessons of the retreat to a neighborhood bar. On a soggy night last month, 250 people attended the first device-free event, held at Jones Bar, between 6 and 9 p.m. “It felt like summer camp,” Mr. Felix said. Mr. Felix also hopes that other restaurants and cafes will institute tech-free “coldspots.” One can imagine the forced bonhomie that might emerge between device users and smokers made to huddle together outside. “We’re in a time of infancy, just starting to figure out the effects of technology on our brains and communities, but there haven’t been any rules set up yet,” he said. “It’s up to us to define what these look like.
“I’m a geek, I’m not a Luddite,” Mr. Felix added. “I love that technology connects us and is taking our civilization to the next level, but we have to learn how to use it, and not have it use us.”
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Prompt: After reading the article, “Learning to Let Go: First, Turn off the Phone,” write an essay between 500 and 800 words in which you argue whether or not establishing “coldspots” at Cal Poly—designated device-free zones—would be an effective way to promote personal and community health. Support your point with original and compelling arguments that go beyond those suggested in the article. If you do not agree that “coldspots” would be beneficial, defend your position using compelling counterarguments, and then explain what you would propose to ensure that, as Levi Felix put it, technology does not “use us.” Your essay should show an understanding of the article without simply repeating it, and you should incorporate specific details from your own experience and knowledge into your response.
