The Little Things We Lost When Everything Moved Online

​Students in my district are in the swing of state testing. As the hallways fill with chaos, misplaced chargers, forgotten Chromebooks, and the general tension that comes with high-stakes testing, the stress of our students is palpable. I sit in my library watching bustling staff and stressed-out students try to get organized and ready, and all I can see are flashes from a simpler time, back when testing still felt stressful, but somehow not quite so sterile.
When I was in high school, our test of choice was the WASL, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. For one week, my class would be holed up in a classroom, working our way through the test section by section. It was daunting, and I’m not going to pretend any of us were thrilled about it, but our teachers always found a way to make it feel less like an assessment and more like something we could actually survive. The entire staff, elementary and high school, would prepare casseroles for us. They brought snacks and drinks that we had access to throughout the day. We were allowed to bring our CD players or MP3 players and earbuds. They tried to make us as relaxed as possible, and in hindsight, I think it worked wonders. We spent the entire week, all day every day, tucked away in a classroom, and most of us did fairly well when our results came in the following summer.
Because testing was still pencil and paper, with no internet, no Wi-Fi, no smartphones, and no high-tech gizmos, we were given liberties students nowadays will probably never get during state testing. Teachers didn’t have to stay on high alert for every shift or sound because we weren’t connected to a world of infinite answers in our pockets or on our wrists. Looking back, I think that lack of connectivity gave us more than just freedom. It gave the whole experience a little more trust, and with that trust came a little less stress.
I understand the convenience of digital testing. Students finished a single test today, and teachers already have that data in front of them instead of having to wait months for results. Students don’t have to be given multiple packets, one with the test material and another to “mark their bubbles completely with a number two pencil.” There are fewer boxes, fewer papers, fewer logistical headaches, and I can absolutely see the appeal of that from an educator’s perspective. But that convenience comes at a cost. Students rush through, simply clicking buttons. Anxieties are higher. Certain comforts aren’t allowed. More regulations are in place to account for the possibility of cheating. We have traded what little comfort we used to be able to provide students during a stressful time for the ease of distribution and instantaneous feedback.
Maybe that is why these changes hit me the way they do. Growing up in the 90s, I feel like I was uniquely blessed with the best and worst of both the digital and analog ages. We were right on the cusp of the internet and modern technology, so we got to learn and grow with it, but we also got to experience life unplugged. We spent more of our summers outside running around town with our friends. When we were in the house, we played video games like Super Mario or Zelda, games that made you work together or think through some puzzle before you could move forward. We were just being introduced to the internet, but we couldn’t waste countless hours on it because inevitably our parents needed the phone line we were tying up. We had CD players and those early MP3 players, but we didn’t have infinite access to every song in the music industry at the tips of our fingers. We were there when cell phones became popular, but they were still mostly for adults. When we finally did get them, all they did was make phone calls, unless your parents were willing to pay fifteen cents per text message.
It was a strange little in-between place to grow up. We had enough technology to be fascinated by it, but not so much that it swallowed every ordinary thing. We still knew what it was like to wait. We knew what it was like to be bored. We knew what it was like to go looking for something to do instead of having a device constantly offering us something to consume. That doesn’t mean everything was better, and I’m not interested in pretending the past was perfect, but I do think there were certain rhythms to life that kept us a little more grounded than we realized at the time.
This desire for convenience doesn’t stop at education. It has seeped into almost every aspect of life as we’ve sought what is quick and easy, and one of the clearest examples is communication. There was a time when communicating with someone took a little more intention. You had to sit down with a piece of paper, find a pen that actually worked, and think about what you wanted to say. Maybe it was a letter. Maybe it was a card. Maybe it was a note tucked into an envelope or folded carefully and passed to a friend. However it happened, it required time. You wrote the words by hand, addressed the envelope, put a stamp in the corner, and dropped it into the mailbox. Then you waited.
Days later, your family member, friend, or loved one would retrieve it from their mailbox, open it, and read your words with care. Maybe once. Maybe twice. Maybe they kept it in a drawer, slipped it into a Bible, tucked it into a box, or saved it with other pieces of life that mattered enough not to throw away. There was a slowness to the process, and there was a softness in that slowness. Because it took effort, we put more thought into it. Because it wasn’t instant, we chose our words with more care. Those messages weren’t just there for talking’s sake. They carried weight because someone had taken the time to write them down.
Now we don’t have the time or patience to wait days to share our thoughts, let alone wait for the response our loved ones may give in return. We have to be able to share every little thing that happens within seconds and receive an almost immediate response. I’m not saying texts and emails are bad. That would be ridiculous, especially considering how often I use both. They are helpful. They are efficient. They allow us to check in, make plans, ask questions, send reminders, and keep life moving. But sometimes keeping life moving is exactly the problem.
In this digital age, where you can send off an email or shoot off a text in seconds, talking has become simply that: talking. A way to fill silence. A way to occupy a moment. A way to toss words into what sometimes feels like an emotionless void. We don’t even take the time to fully write out words anymore, instead relying on abbreviations like “lol” or “btw.” We can write a message, get a reply, and move through subjects quickly and efficiently, but we also get inundated with constant, scattered messages until it becomes easy to wonder, “What were we talking about?” or “Who was I saying that to?” We’ve taken the art of communication and simplified it so much that sometimes I wonder if it has changed the way we speak to one another in person, too. People struggle to sit in awkward silences. We miss social cues. We say things too quickly, sometimes on accident and sometimes on purpose. So much of our communication has become reaction instead of reflection.
One of the coziest things we’ve lost in all of this is photographs. Because I grew up in that strange 90s in-between, photographs still felt like something special. Cameras weren’t always in our pockets. Someone had to remember to bring one. Someone had to buy film. Someone had to decide whether a moment was worth one of the twenty-four or thirty-six pictures on the roll. There was no taking fifty-seven versions of the same pose and deleting the ones where your eyes looked weird. You took the picture and hoped for the best.
Then came the waiting. You dropped the film off at Walmart or Costco, and eventually someone brought home that little envelope full of memories. Some pictures were blurry. Some had red eyes. Someone’s thumb might be in the corner. Half the time, no one was looking at the camera. But those imperfections were part of the charm. There were drawers full of printed photographs, shoeboxes stuffed with them, albums with sticky pages and plastic covers, duplicate prints, and film strips tucked into the back of the envelope. Pictures were passed from hand to hand while someone said, “Oh, remember this?” or “Look how little you were.” There was something about sitting on the floor with family or friends, thumbing through physical pictures, that made memory feel shared. You weren’t just looking at an image. You were holding a piece of a moment someone thought was worth saving.
Now we walk around with cameras in our pockets, thanks to our carefully crafted smartphones. Whenever we see something worthy of being photographed, all we have to do is point and click. We have tools like Instagram where we can share those pictures instantly, not just with family and friends, but with strangers around the world who can validate our artistic eye. And yes, that can be fun. It can be creative. It can help us stay connected. But as we snap picture after picture, I think we lose some of the why behind taking them. Instead of documenting a moment so we can look back on it later, we try to get the “just right” angle for Instagram. We record the perfect TikTok instead of capturing a heartfelt moment we might want to show our kids years from now. Photos have become less about sharing our lives and more about sharing for likes.
Of course, we can still scroll back through them later. We can still save them, print them, organize them, and treasure them if we choose to. But there is something different about thumbing through physical copies with their small quirks and imperfections. There is something different about photographs that have fingerprints on the edges because they have been held, passed around, laughed over, cried over, and remembered out loud. Instead of drawers full of memories with loved ones, we have clouds full of meaningless clicks that all start to look the same.
All of these things used to be staples in life. They weren’t second-guessed. They weren’t even terribly inconvenient. But as technology has advanced and woven itself into every aspect of our lives, we’ve leaned on it more and more in ways we never really needed to, except for the sake of convenience. I don’t want to get rid of technology. I don’t think we could, even if we wanted to. My job depends on it, my writing depends on it, and so much of how we work, learn, communicate, and create depends on it. But I do think convenience is not always as neutral as we pretend it is.
Sometimes what we call convenience is really just the removal of friction, and not all friction is bad. Some friction slows us down long enough to think. Some of it makes us more patient. Some of it gives us time to choose our words, sit with our memories, care for others, and notice the people in front of us. Maybe what I miss isn’t really paper tests, handwritten letters, or printed photographs. Maybe what I miss are the human fingerprints they carried.