Digital Nation: Technology Around Us

We are all exposed to hundreds of different technologies in our daily lives. Sometimes for us to feel better about how we control these devices and still engaging in our school, work, and personal life, we tend to multitask. Multitasking is using your laptop to check your email, while texting your friend about dinner that night on your cell phone. It never seems like a serious problem to multitask, you’re getting two (maybe more) things done at once, right? However, multitasking isn’t actually helping us complete things faster or more efficiently.
In the documentary, Digital Nation, students at MIT were used in studies about multitasking. One student in particular, Eliza, uses multitasking to it’s fullest extent. She would constantly be checking her email, refreshing the page over and over, chatting with friends on Facebook, texting, doing homework on her computer, and many other things. She was glued to her phone and multitasking quickly became apart of her life. This shows, and I think it speaks for lots of students and people all over the nation, that multitasking just feels normal. We have become so accustomed to doing more than one thing at a time and it helps us get through our days. 
The studies that they did at MIT with other students like Eliza, shows that multitasking actually isn't as efficient as we believe it to be. When you do more than one thing in a certain moment, you are not completing them to your fullest potential. The professors at MIT also stated that they believed their students could fully comprehend information better and would see greater results in test grades in they stopped multitasking and started focusing on class. Concentration levels haves rapidly decreased because our attention spans are too short because we’ve become so dependent on multitasking.
I myself, believe that sometimes I am able to multitask. I multitask all the time if you consider it be as simple as listening to music and doing homework. It comes easily to us nowadays to just to do two or maybe even three things at one time. We don’t really think about watching television and then texting a friend or tweeting about the show, we just do it. If there’s one thing to say about multitasking, is that happens, sometimes beyond our own knowledge. When we are in class, we will check our phones or we will secretly listen to headphones because it’s become essential to us to be doing more than one thing, such as paying attention in class or participating in a conversation. Our attention spans are so short from regularly multitasking and having our devices in front of us, instantly changing and refreshing. When was the last time you sat through an entire class without looking at your phone or thinking about it? 

      In just a matter of a couple decades, we have developed what feels like an entirely new world. The technology we have created, in a way, has now created our minds. We are engulfed in our phones and our computers and they are sculpting us as how we respond and act. The technology we have brought into our world has us on a leash. In the Digital Nation documentary, a quote was said along the lines of “the machines don’t care if we don’t respond, WE care.” That reins true because we aren’t hurting the computer or the phone if we don’t use it, we are restricting ourselves. Multitasking has become so prominent as well that we feel useless or anxiety-ridden if we aren’t constantly checking our devices, but our devices aren’t upset, we are.
Using all this technology has changed us as humans. Everywhere you look, people are using their phones and ignoring the world around them to text someone or check Facebook or even just feel anxiety when their phones aren’t near them at all times. Being so dependent on this technology isn’t a good thing and if we continue to use it at an increasingly high rate, I’m sure we’ll feel the consequences of in our future one way or another.