With the rise of digital media, a highly addictive medium, worries are made about the effects it has on people. Students are multitasking and not accomplishing much, people are communicating more comfortably through Facebook and text messaging as opposed to face to face, and information is being spread like wildfire (youtube, online news, blog, and of course, Wikileaks). With all this out there, there are many speculations and concerns that are on the subject matter of the effects that digital media have on people.
I'll begin by commenting on the Social-Political concerns. Just by personal experience I'll boldly say that youtube videos, facebook posts, and blogs have made politics more accessible to young people (i. e. all them 12 year olds in political comment wars on youtube!). A video that makes fun of a well know politician such as the president, a senator, etc. can be quite effective propaganda on the young minds. I feel that young students would rather watch a video that trashes George Bush or Barack Obama before wrapping their minds around the works of John Locke or Thomas Hobbs. In Justin McIntosh's video "Right Wing Radio Duck", a clear satire is made on the listeners of Glenn Beck. The video's purpose is to show a gullible duck falling for Glenn's word for word until the duck becomes paranoid. This is an effective video, indeed, and will have a lot of effect on the youtube surfers to make an opinion on Glenn Beck.
Social lives are changing too. While some find Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace all very addictive and create sterile, relationships between people who can't hold a face to face conversation, there are some very interesting new results that are quite to the contrary. In Laura Owen's article, "The Internet and Social Relationships" we see results that social sites create larger social cirlces of friends, communitiy involvement, and a growing sense of trust in people. Also very interesting is the article by Mimi Ito, whom feels that the generation who grew up on Pokemon are quite literate. I agree completely. Pokemon was a great game that encouraged reading along with solving puzzles, all the while by battling with cool monsters. I remember even looking up words I came across in Pokemon that I did not know in the dictionary, like the word "paralysis", for example, which was commonly used in the game.
Along with the change of social lives, we also see a change in emotions. In the "Internet Addiction Guide" by John Grohol, their is a speculation that people whom are addicted to things like the internet do not want to deal with their life problems. In other words, the internet becomes an outlet to escape to for people who can't see to enjoy the outside word. Of course with social sites and massive amounts of websites, it goes without saying the that internet is by far one of the most addicting pieces of technology. Internet addiction is a hard thing to cure but it is important to notice how anti-social people are usually those addicted to the internet. I liked the Dilbert cartoon on the article especially when Dilbert tells his doctor, "I'm addicted to the internet because it's more interesting than people." I'm sure many would find this true; the internet is quite a compelling world.
Digital technology have drastically chagned how we learn, think, and read. Instead of reading an article fully through and engaging the mind in the deep intricacies of the text, people have now begun to read in a "staccato quality" and "quickly scan short passages of text from many sources online" (from Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making us Stupid?"). This is equivalent of loggin into the internet, going to Yahoo, and reading only the headlines and captions of the artircles that are posted on the homepage. So much is put out on the internet that no one has time to read it all. With the mind achknowledging the massive quantity of the information, it instantly begins reading in "skim mode", knowing that it is impossible to deeply interpret each article, but motivated by the curiosity to know everything that it can.
When it comes to behavioral worries, the first thing that comes to mind is multitasking. How many things can a person do at once? According to John Hamiltion in his article, "Multitasking Brain Divides and Conquers, To a Point", "our brains are set up to do two tasks at once, but not three". This is based on his research that the brain has two lobes. When a person is given two tasks to perform at once, the brain amazingly splits the tasks so one task can be focused by one side of the brain and the other by the other side. Now this is really fascinating stuff. Just as I am typing here now and working on this blog, I happened to notice this shear magic of the work of two things at once by the brain. I am formulating ideas into sentences in my brain as well as intricately moving my fingers across the keyboard to type. Now working on one thing at once works fine, but the brain can become bored by having both of the sides of the brain working on the same thing. It's like when you're reading a book and you start to loose focus and just start to read words instead of reading the words and engaging your imagination. So yes, we multitask all the time but we have limits. It's like driving; keeping your eyes focused on the road and working the controls to move the car works fine, but once we add a third thing like texting while driving, we can end up in trouble.
I'm a rare example of someone who is not addicted to technology but I did become more involved with it this year at UNCSA. This is mostly because I live on campus, where I have a computer in my bedroom. You see, when I commuted to college for my freshman year at Salisbury University, my family (me, my mom, and my dad) all had to share one computer which was placed in my dad's office room. That's just the way it is since we only have one internet connection. So because I never used the internet much but when I did it was about an hour straight a day since I had to find an open amount of time that my dad did not use the computer; I could not log in and log off very half an hour or so. So the point is that while being here, on campus, with a computer at my disposal, I ended up logging into Facebook whenever I entered my room. What this did was allow a frequent distraction in the flow of my day; work was not getting done, practice time was becoming shorter due to this, etc., so what I did was plan to not use Facebook for a week. And to no surprise, it turned out successful. I was able to sustain a frame of mind that was focused on primarily my schoolwork goals.
To conclude, everyone needs to get away from the internet at one point, but when used responsively, the internet is a great resource. The amount of reading on the internet along with social network communicating actually has some really positive effects after all; not everyone is a Facebook addict.
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