‘I’m a modern-day luddite’: Meet the students who don’t use laptops
‘I’m a modern-day luddite’: Meet the students who don’t use laptops
The vast majority of students rely on laptops – and increasingly AI – to help with their university work. But a small number are going analogue and eschewing tech almost entirely in a bid to re-engage their brains
Title is misleading:
Nick, a philosophy student at the University of Cambridge, stopped using his laptop for university work in the last year of his undergraduate degree. He still types his essays, but lecture notes, revision, and essay planning are all done by hand.
The second sentence contradicts the first:
stopped using his laptop for university work
then
He still types his essays
So basically he's not taking a laptop in to the lecture hall to take notes etc but is still using a computer to complete his work. Which makes sense as pen & paper in that environment is way more practical anyway.
All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.
They're still using computers to do their university work and submit it though. It's more about them not using a laptop in a lecture hall and using pen and paper instead. That's not really a big deal considering that's probably what most people were doing anyway up until relatively recently.
Honestly I used to do the same a decade ago in engineering before changing majors mainly cause my laptop was a fucking brick.
Yeah, the way he does it is basically how everyone did it even 10 years ago. The tools were mostly the same then as they are now, with the exception of AI and the fact that handwriting wasn't as big a thing anymore when today's undergrads were in school. If you have a fluid and moderately quick handwriting, paper notes will typically be easier to take and more useful for revising the material later on.
Studies have also shown that taking notes by writing causes better learning outcomes compared to typing.
That's only true if you don't refer to your notes. Reviewing notes has a much stronger correlation to remembering than how those notes are generated.
Can confirm, switched away from laptop notes to incomprehensible-to-others fountain pen writing. Writing is the important part anyway.
Wasn't the case for me for information dense subjects like biology related subjects. Found I didn't retain anything, but worst of all my notes were so messy I couldn't even use them, so ended up wasting time having to go back and listen to the lecture again to create notes I could study off of and make short summaries of to start memorizing.
Some exceptions to typing has been problem solving basic subjects like math where there's no rush to try to get down bunch of information, so for that I definitely go handwriting. Doesn't make sense to type that either. But, for really information dense subjects its typing all the way.
I used to take my laptop into the lecture hall but I hardly ever actually used it.
Same. I mostly used it for homework between classes.
I found the most effective strategy for me was to do the reading before class, bring the book in to refer to, listen intently for things I didn't get from the book, and reread the section after class. If the professor specifically called out something to take notes on, I'd either do that on my phone or pull out my laptop (esp just before midterms or finals).
My handwriting is awful and I almost never refer to my notes anyway.
Exactly how does he research his essays without internet access?
Well you see he's stopped using the internet for his university work. But he still uses the internet for research for his essays.
I absolutely love doing everything on the computer and can’t stand writing things by hand anymore. I’ve always learned simply by listening — instructors that force students to take notes were the worst because I would be too busy scrambling to write things down than actually listening and learning.
All of this goes out the window when it comes to foreign language though. I have to do everything old school: textbooks, pencil and paper, and if it’s a non-Latin character set I have to write the same characters over and over for hours.
For me I always wrote as i listened, still do often. I rarely read the notes back.
'Revision' was just writing a whole new set of notes either from memory or from sources. Then, never reading that set of notes.
Massive waste of paper and ink, but it's part of how i pay attention. Most of my lecturers did provide printouts of all the slides, but I'd scribble all over them anyway.
Typing doesn't do the same thing at all for me.
I realized that when i tried to cheat on a test in school, that when i prepared a cheat sheet, i didn't actually need it afterwards - that only applies when writing the sheet by hand.
I always take notes, listening shmistening it's in one ear out the other, reading and writing helps me absorb information much easier, but I never did take notes when we were forced to use pen and paper, once we switched to laptops in high school, I could note down every word because typing is so much easier and faster.
I love digital because it is so easy to go back and reference old notes too. I use obsidian, and being able to go back and recall something I need a more detailed refresher on is so convenient.
My handwritten stuff got trashed because I'm not digging through all that and was just taking up space.
I hate how the term Luddite has been co-opted as a blanket term for someone who rejects technology for any reason. The original Luddites were a labor movement who were angry that technology was taking people’s livelihoods while society was doing nothing to prevent those people from becoming destitute.
Kinda exactly how AI is going to fuck over a lot of people while primarily benefiting the rich people who own it.
Was gonna bring up the same point about Luddites. They were absolutely pro-automation.
They saw greedy corporations using automation, and getting ready to fuck their society into the dirt, so they started petitioning their local governments, tried to negotiate and drew up the plans for a social security program ~150 years before one was actually implemented, smashed a bunch of expensive corporate equipment when the government wouldn't respond, then the government sided with corporate, used the military to drag all the men, women, and children into public squares and executed every last one of them. Even relatives and companions that weren't in the group and didn't participate. So thoroughly annihilated that it left an informational pinhole in the history books, and the name was co-opted into an insult. Now we're really not sure if John Ludd even existed, maybe the name was just a mythical legend already, and was used as a rally point to boost morale.
And here we are, barely 200 years in the future, about to repeat the fuzzy spots again and rediscover why we brought citrus fruits with us on the ships, with the general population completely oblivious to the brutality the owner class is ready and able to deploy.
What happens if the tech bros are right, and the machine doesn't need 9/10ths of the human population any more?
Luddite is a derogatory term anyway. One might have legit reasons to be against personally using certain technologies
Indeed. The Luddites the high-skilled technology workers of their time! And were the first bloody chapter of the labour movement, nearly erased from that history by their oppressors. "Blood in the machine" by Brian Merchant is a great history of this.
Laptops are extremely useful. It really doesn't make sense to avoid them.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
As someone who studied without laptop through an entire bachelor's degree - it is a valid option, and I still often make handwritten notes of study materials.
When you write things down by hand, you process information for longer and use more parts of your brain to do so, which genuinely helps to memorize study materials.
It also allows for more focus. Personally, I found that when I moved, eventually, to using laptop in my studies, it has reduced my attention span and added unnecessary distractions. When all you have at your fingertips is paper and a pen, there is nowhere to get astray.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
Withering away your first brain in the process.
Not really.
I do that but its actually because I just don't own a laptop and don't want to buy one
I did that in uni, too. Everyone brought their laptops to the lectures while I took notes on paper. Writing by hand makes your brain absorb the information better I think
Not just what you think. Hand writing is scientifically better for memory retention and more https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/
It's undeniably better for memorization. But I think it has diminishing returns for comprehension.
Perhaps it's just my learning style. I found paying full attention to lectures instead of splitting my attention between dictating and listening, allowed me to absorb more of the material than if I went back to look at notes.
Further, my career best final exam score was 99% on a biology final. I literally re-wrote my study notes out 7 times during the week prior. When I got the test back the following week I couldn't recall any of the information I had memorized.
It does. I vastly prefer writing notes by hand than typing em. But my handwriting sucks when I have to write quickly, and I also don’t like lugging around giant stacks of paper. And so I settled on a digital writing pad, and just do the work to type my notes later. Acts as revision too.
Same for me. Also I sat in front, becouse in the back I would be disturbed by all the not-lecture related stuff people had open on their laptops.
It does, but in my experience, it's way worse for recollection.
Electronic devices are superior when it comes to storing and organizing data, which makes it a better tool if you prefer to use active recall as a memorisation method.
I had literal books worth of notes until switching to a tablet (a stylus keeps the benefits of writing, btw). And going over them when preparing for exams was an absolute nightmare.
Me too, but that's because my parents bought me a laptop with like a 19 inch screen thinking it would be helpful. That fucker was heavy.
Good for these kids. It's a wise move!
i much prefered writing notes on paper but i'd cry if i had to write an essay by hand, i hope those students aren't torturing themselves this way
When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.
Every English class at my uni has huge, like 10-page essays (can you even call them essays at this point?) where we cover scientific developments in our field we discovered in that month.
Everything is handwritten because "there were students who used LLMs, and they need to be sure at least some effort is put into admission". Like, just to spite on LLM users and all of us just in case.
o.o holy shit- i mean that's a valid move, using AI for a handwritten piece sounds like a pain in the ass, but so does just writing 10 pages by hand, AI or not!
i'm glad i got through my higher education marginally before the AI boom hit (i graduated 3 years ago). i only had Turnitin yell "PLAGIARISM???" at me when i used a common phrase that another student used at some point somewhere (think - "The research suggests...", or sometimes even the page numbers), good times good times
I really like being able to Ctrl+F through my book.
But there just seems to be some kind of feel to flipping a page that makes me feel more focussed.
Engagement. I'm a teacher and using all of your senses to look for information makes you remember that said piece of information more.
It's funny, most studying comes down to that... And motivation, which is also something you have if you prefer books over laptop.
Your book does one single thing, you cannot be distracted by other functions.
Plus the tactile feel and responsiveness of a book us unmatched, it's lightweight and portable, you will never run out of battery, and flipping back and forth through pages is much more intuitive that jumping between bookmarks in pdfs and ebooks, the only thing that comes close is e ink readers but those have their own tradeoffs
That's only going to affect me if I am reading something particularly boring and don't really want to read it.
But if that were the case, I wouldn't be reading it in the first place.
I don't feel the need to rid myself of distractions, because when I am not in the mood to read a book, I don't read it.
Also, this "distracted by functionality" logic is what parents seem to use to get rid of stuff with a screen.
I can say for sure, that people being loud in another room is a much bigger distraction.
If your OS is distracting you, you have installed the wrong one.
I think it's the mental work of "I don't have to do anything, it will find it for me" and "I have to find it myself" and I think it puts you in a state mentally and keeps you there. You don't have to disengage because there's something else doing the work.
The trick is to buy dead tree and also download the same book from the usual online libraries.
Went to school before the late '90s: Write everything in paper notebooks & exam books.
Went to school between late '90s-2020s: Tap it all into a computer. Learn nothing.
Went to school late 2020s on: Write in paper notebooks, in between scavenging the ruins for food.
Is taking notes by hand really that exceptional? When I went to college ages ago I only typed essays on a desktop computer, studying was done with textbook + lecture notes, maaybe with a handful of online resources.
I can kind of see this right now. I'm in a first year course and almost everyone has a laptop in front of them. I'm in a fourth year course and most people use paper notes. It could be survivorship or a result of differences in the desks, or it could be generational.
I graduated college a few years back and can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) how many times I saw someone hand writing notes in class
As “someone who gets distracted very easily,” he made the change to reclaim his attention span. Ditching his laptop gave him an environment where “YouTube isn’t around the corner” and he can focus on his reading.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
Reminds me a lot of fellow classmates at my college who I discovered hate online classes because they say they can't stay focused. So I don't know how these "luddite" students plan to not get distracted when their job will most likely involve sitting in front of a computer.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
I used to be easily distracted during online lectures yet had little difficulty following live lectures. It's a fundamentally different experience, for whatever reason.
Also, the attention span has to be trained. And training it by working without a distracting computer sounds like a good idea.
I had the opposite experience, in person lectures drove me crazy as an unmedicated adhder, I'd be constantly chiming in and answering every question, my legs would be going wild under the table and I'd usually be just doing something else most of the time on the laptop. Online is much much easier to listen to and get invested in at your own time and pace because you can be eating or vaping while watching at 3AM or whatever and nobody gives a fuck
Attention span is cultivated, so is discipline. Reading about it is theory. Forcing oneself to do it, in increasingly sizable chunks, is praxis. I'm talking to myself here, too.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.
That sounds like he's just not going to be well adjusted for the modern world where distractions will always be available. You don't get over a love for a drug by making it unavailable, you get over it by having it everywhere, yet refusing it.
I really like this idea, but its difficult. when I used to attend uni it was more feasible but in 2025 all of my courses require online submissions, discussion, and materials. I can rent a laptop from the library, but only for 4 hours at a time. Of course there are desktops, but realistically if you want work from home you need a computer/tablet. That said I still just borrow my partners and haven't bothered to buy one.
i think its mostly AI that was the problem. we all used notebooks even last decade, you just cant concentrate with a laptop writing notes.
I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.
As such, it's completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D'n'D notes, maps for games that I've been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you're meeting someone - they can see you're just making notes and writing to-dos.
Speak for yourself, I've taken typed notes successfully just fine.
While browsing Insta and Tiktok on a cellphone in class. That word does not mean what you think it means.
Going to school with a book instead of a phone is way more enjoyable.
Is now a good time to complain about that one guy who brings a $3000 gaming laptop to the computer science lectures because expensive stuff makes him a good programmer and proceeds to distract people accross the room by the sheer volume of his fan spinning?
Don't complain about my Lenovo Jetpad. The jet engine helped me think by drowning out other sounds.
I'm deaf now, but that was a sacrifice.
We must stop using devices that use Abominable Intelligence.
They will be our doom
I just have a hard time picturing things being so different from when I left academia only a couple of years ago. Everybody still had pen and paper notebooks
Let me guess. They don't use a laptop, but brag about it endlessly on tiktok with a holier-than-thou attitude? It's just content farming then.
Have you seen people on TikTok bragging about this or are you just coming up with hypotheticals for funsies?
There were trends to switch to dumbphones last year, retro media like vinyl, they always came with a wave of content. Pretty sure video essays about someone using a dumbphone while carrying a camera around town are just doing it for content. This one wouldn't be any different.
I did something insane: I actually read the article.
The students interviewed used pen and paper because they lack the tempting distractions a laptop/tablet/phone has. One states they feel they "use their brain more" when using a pen and paper. They also mention using a computer to write the final version of an essay for submission, but do most of the work on pen and paper first for the aforementioned reasons.
I haven't been to school for a couple decades. Do they no longer teach how to take proper notes in your first year (paper or computer or otherwise)?
First year... In college? No, that's pre-requisite knowledge that they expect students to have from secondary school.
Good for them
Imagine choosing suffering voluntarily in 2025. What a privileged fuck.
I’m pretty sure that “not using a laptop is suffering” is actually the privileged take here.
That’s not what being a Luddite means
What a pedantic (and incorrect) take. Luddite can absolutely mean a person who purposefully avoids technology.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but words can have multiple meanings and take on new meanings over time. Luddite is one of them. This article used it properly.
And anyone who disagrees with me can kiss my linguistics-degree-holding ass.
Yeah, there's this stereotype that professional/qualified linguistics are like super prescriptive but in reality most either don't give a shit or are interested in informal language
"Modern day" Luddite. It's not just using the word isolated! Tittle clearly mixes the meaning with the historical reference. Plus, the one being pedantic were you.. But thanks anyway for pointing out the word has two definitions.
Indeed
What does it mean then?
In your defense, the statement specifies "modern-day Luddite" which compares it to the historical Luddite bands and excludes the first meaning of the Oxford dictionary.
Also, avoiding is not the same as opposing.
Got a better word?