Reading Response 3

The PBS documentary, Digital Nation, the producer Rachel Dretzin and her correspondent Doug Rushkoff cover the effects the internet and virtual realities are having of education, culture, and life today. They cover a wide range of topics including multitasking, video gaming addiction, how virtual reality is changing the military and many more. At MIT when interviewing students they found that many students are multitasking like never before and see themselves as good at it. As one student points out, “I feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well and that we do at all times.” But according to a study by Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford people are not really as good of multitasks as they think. What he found was the exact opposite of what the students interviewed at MIT thought about their ability to multitask. According to Nass, “multitasks are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly.” The focus of the video then briefly shifts to South Korea and the problems they are having with internet addiction and what they are doing to help it. Korea has started educating young children about the internet and how to use it responsibly. Although this is quite interesting Rushkoff believes this wouldn’t work in America,” I'm skeptical that this top-down approach could ever work in America.” Dretzin and Rushkoff then focus on some schools, such as I.S.339, that are trying new experimental ways of teaching. They have made it so every student uses a laptop for their classes. According to David Pristein, Dean of Instruction at I.S.339, since implementing this policy they have seen an almost 90 percent rise in attendance and 40 percent rise in math scores. They go on to explore many more ways the internet affects us such as companies having entire meetings in virtual reality and Air Force pilots who, from the safety of Nevada, fly missions into war zones everyday with their remote control drones.

I think that my life has been affected by the internet in a good way for many reasons. It allows instant access to news form all over the world; I think this is good because I can stay informed about what is going on in the world around me. Another way the internet has had a positive impact is that it allows me to connect with my family. I have family located all across the county (Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia) and email and more recently Facebook have made it easy for us to stay in touch with each other. I am a naturally curious person; if I find something remotely interesting, it can be really random sometimes. To me I have the need to find out whatever I can about it. The internet allows me access to vast amounts of easily searchable material. When reading about one thing I can also access info about a related subject if I need to. A recent example of this is me satisfying a random curiosity about wolf/dog hybrids, which led to me reading about the domestication of dogs, which led to me looking up all the extinct species of wolves. That why I think the internet has enriched my life, easy communication with distant family and the wealth of knowledge it allows a person to have at their finger tips.