It’s no secret that many aspects of our lives are moving online and supporting electronic varieties. Newspapers, communication with friends, and more recently, calendars have all witnessed a marked transition to the digital. Thinking about the extent to which you can use your smart mobile devices for so many tasks, it’s really incredible that you can keep track of your entire life on a screen small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. While some people may have initially resisted the move to using an online calendar from a neatly handwritten planner, there is no denying the simplicity and temptation Google Calendar provides. But what does it say about our society that we are moving calendars online?
For one thing, it means we are getting lazy. It does require more physical effort to flip to a specific week in a planner, find the date of an event, and write out all the necessary information, such as the time, location, and special notes. There’s something to be said for writing down important information because there is research that supports memory by writing. However, online calendars have made the process of scheduling events a whole lot faster: with a few simple clicks on your keyboard, you arrive at the relevant time, and input your event. Sometimes, it’s even easier than this: you may receive an email with a link at the bottom, “Add to your Google Calendar.” By merely pressing once on this link, your event becomes incorporated into your own Google Calendar, alongside your other personal events for that day. You can even RSVP to the event with this function if it’s something like a club meeting, so that the facilitator knows whether you can make it.
Online calendars also change the meaning of color-coding. Before calendars moved online, people would buy their favorite brand of colorful pens, and, if they were especially organized, color code their events, using a different pen for different aspects of their schedules. However, this is easy to mess up; if you accidentally write down an event in the wrong-colored ink, there’s no simple fix. You would either have to cross out what you had written (and who likes cross-outs all over their planners?) or accept the fact that writing in one neutral color such as black or dark blue for everything in your schedule would be more forgiving. In contrast, online google calendars allow you to easily color-code your events, while forgiving your occasional mistake: if you accidentally schedule the meeting with your TA during office hours in yellow instead of the green typically used for work in that specific class, no worries! You can easily edit the event and switch the alert color to green. There are also more online colors available than you could purchase in one pack, because you can design your own color if you don’t like the ones that are already available. While color-coding may be more seamless online, there still have to be people out there who appreciate the feel of a perfect pink pen-point in a handwritten, old-fashioned calendar to notify you of a celebratory upcoming event.
Last but certainly not least, calendars moving online demonstrates our society’s frenetic and chaotic lifestyle—so much so that we require notifications to alarm us of when and where we should be at different places. With a handwritten planner, there is no formal alarm system besides your own brain; only you can remind yourself to take out the planner and see where your next appointment is. You can set up an online calendar, however, to notify you however you would prefer. Do you want to be notified 10 minutes before the event starts? Do you need 30 minutes of travel time for one particular event? Done. With so many possible events in one day, it is certainly nice to have a notification pop up on your phone when you should start thinking about your next activity. However, there is something to be said for remembering a day’s schedule, as well. If we rely on our phones for every reminder, surely our memories won’t stay as sharp as they could.
Online calendars have a lot of perks, and it makes sense why so many people have adapted their schedules to online mediums. Between the color-of-your-choice and easy reminders, Google Calendars can provide planning aspects that simply were not possible with the old-fashioned agenda. With that said, it’s important to keep in mind how a seemingly surface-level shift from the handwritten to online planner is indicative of greater, more substantial societal changes. We don’t want to become so heavily dependent on technology that our power as humans to remember events, write them down, and plan our lives becomes impossible without online tools.
