Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Digital Nation

In the PBS documentary “Digital Nation”, Producer Rachel Dretzin and her correspondent, Douglas Rushkoff inspect the positive and negative impacts of our rapidly developing digital world. In their investigation, they direct their focus on the different aspects and areas of our modern pandemic world technology. From household to work place to schools and even military. In fact, the inspection revealed that each one of us is somehow impacted by the rapid spread of digital technology. In most schools, students are allowed to have their laptops, thereby are constantly connected to their social networks which distracts them from keeping up with the lecture. In the video, an instructor whose aware of this phenomena decided to test his students in order to measure how well they are paying attention to the lecture and whether they are absorbing the information from the assigned readings. So he gave his class a midterm containing obvious questions in which the whole class should’ve gotten 100%. The result wasn’t as impressive as expected, for the highest score was 70%. This clearly states that students are distracted by their virtual realities. Moreover, they claim that they are capable of multitasking and so keeping up with their virtual realities including Facebook, texting, E-mails, Games and their actual reality. As a consequence of this claim, a professor in California university decided to conduct the first study that has ever been done in consideration of multitasking. The study involved some high chronic multi-taskers on the college campus. The result of the experiment revealed that multi tasking is not as effective as the students claim it is. The professor concluded that they are significantly slower when they are switching from task to task than when they are consistently focusing on one task. In reality, it turned out that they are terrible at every aspect of multitasking because there brain is being constantly distracted which disorganizes the memory. The issue appearing here is that this modern technology is creating people that are unable to think clearly. So we are changing what it means to be a human being. According to the latest data, most of today’s kids spend more than 50hours a week with digital media. Kid’s today are being raised in an internet era and they depend on the digital so much for their sense of connection to other people. Douglas Rushkoff States that we are inhabiting the net as if it was a real place. However he does acknowledge that the virtual world offers a new reality for humans and that technology isn’t good or bad but rather powerful.

I was raised in an internet era myself, I conquer that it has significantly revolutionized my life in a positive way. But how would I know how my life would’ve been without it ? I depend on internet for most of my research whether it’s nature is intellectual or academic. Several of my social interactions with people are online and so in a virtual reality. I like being able to share my thoughts with a wide audience. It doesn’t matter if they are virtual or real since the nature of the information I am sharing is the same. I also appreciate being able to actually see and talk with my family overseas which if one takes the time to reflect on it, it appears to be totally supernatural. I mean it’s incredibly magical what a wired world can offer.

No comments:

Post a Comment