Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. When you have a paper to write, you have three options for computer access — your room, a cluster or the library. If you want to make plans, get directions or talk to someone who’s not standing beside you, you head to your dorm room and hope that the person you’re calling is home too. When you want to set the mood, you can either turn on the radio or put a legally purchased CD in the boombox. Oh, and when you need to take notes in class, you pull out a pen and a spiral notebook, then try to listen, think and scribble at the same time.

Sounds horribly inconvenient, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, though, these confining circumstances describe life as I knew it only six years ago. Amazing how technology flies. Now, as I sit in an off-campus cafe, typing on a laptop while listening to my iPod in order to drown out the man next to me on the cell phone, I wonder: What have we given up in the name of convenience?

In Y2K, the tech-speak term for the year 2000, I arrived on campus with two large machines in tow: my gigantic bright-blue iMac and a matching bicycle. Inside my 10x10 cube in Larkin, my roommate and I agreed to split the cost of a landline, then splurged on a cordless phone that would allow us to make calls from as far away as the stairwell just outside our door (provided it was ajar).

Born and raised without a television, I have never been ahead of the technological curve, but I was hardly alone in my anxiety about a new service called “Napster.” Unlike certain conscientious individuals, however, my decision not to install the music-sharing software was not an ideological one; copyright infringement meant nothing to me, but the nightmare of corrupted files did. In retrospect, of course, I might re-run the cost-benefit analysis of this decision — highly unlikely potential virus then versus hundreds of thousands of free songs now.... Tough choice.

While my roommate downloaded every eighties song I’d never heard, I dedicated my online time to another relatively new invention. In a brilliant PR move, AOL made its unique instant messenger service AIM available free of charge (yes, there was a time when you had to be a dues-paying member). Keeping tabs on my friends across the country was fun, but I drew the line when my next-door neighbor struck up a conversation. I could practically hear him typing on the other side of the wall.

Alongside its social benefits, AIM also presented the first of many opportunities to practice multitasking in its new tech-driven form. It took several months, but I eventually learned how to carry on two, sometimes three, conversations at once. However, I soon realized that, while I viewed every interaction as a full-blown tete-a-tete, most people were chatting with a half-dozen people while answering email and while playing online chess. Waiting on the edge of my desk chair for a three-letter abbreviated response, I not only felt anxious, I also actually felt less connected to the people on the other end.

By sophomore year, Napster was enmeshed in lawsuits and my AIM use had dwindled to nothing. But the tech world has a way of reinventing itself. Up next: the luxurious, independence-threatening, cancer-causing cell phone. I could now walk, talk and read The Daily at the same time, a truly wonderful, if life-imperiling, feat. My initial compromise — I would turn the phone off whenever my full attention might really be needed — soon gave way to an insatiable desire to know who might call. Besides, what else was I supposed to do with my non-steering hand?

As often happens with objects we carry everywhere, my cell phone gradually became an extension of myself. I do not know at what point I stopped memorizing people’s numbers, but when I misplaced my little piece of plastic for a very lonely and panic-filled 48 hours, I realized that, without the aid of my brain’s newest extension, I would only be able to call two places for the rest of my life. It’s a good thing I love my high-school best friend’s parents as well as my own.

Junior year brought with it my next theoretically freeing technological advance. With my sexy new laptop, I could work anywhere on campus — in the CoHo, in the Quad, in the back of the classroom.... Now, I am sure many of my fellow laptop-users can check Gmail/Wikipedia/Facebook while taking substantive notes/listening attentively, but my old-fashioned brain is simply not trained to multitask that effectively. The unmitigated fear that I might miss something really important (as well as the weight factor) means that my new laptop generally resided in the same place as its predecessor — front and center on my desk.

But despite its desk-bound fate, my laptop also worked its way into my device dependency. By mid-November of my senior year, with job applications and a 100 page thesis in full swing, my aptly-named ThinkPad had become part and parcel of my writing process. In a moment I have replayed hundreds of times since, I spilled the teensiest, tiniest bit of water on its keyboard. As I stood over its body with a hair dryer, praying for a complete recovery, I verged on my own form of a breakdown. Forget about plastic and wire — my hard drive is comprised of my blood, sweat and tears.

For all of my fears about sensory overload, social ADD and physical safety, though, I would be loathe to return to the time before Google was a verb and the Facebook was something other than a physical book of embarrassing high-school senior portraits. Despite its potential drawbacks, technology has undoubtedly made life eaer for paper writers, social butterflies and procrastinators alike, and I count myself a member of at least two of the previous categories. I cannot imagine writing without my laptop, driving without my hybrid Honda Civic or running without my Nano, and not just because they make life easy — they make life fun. At the sme time, however, I write to be read, drive to meet friends and run to play sports. For me at least, it’s the human interactions enabled by technology that make it all worthwhile.

Lisa Mendelman has succumbed to the latest tech craze and started an online writing portfolio that looks suspiciously like a website. Check it out at www.lisamendelman.com, then email her at lisame@stanford.edu.