Digital Nation

The documentary Digital Nation is mainly about how the world is technology prone today. It points out many things, but I will focus on family interactions with technology. In reality the brain is not made to multitask and people who think that they are good at it are not in reality. They are taking time away to do things that are not important and worry about other things when they should be working on only what needs to be done.

I can make numerous connections to this story to my everyday life. One connection that I can make is my ability to multitask. When I sit down to my work homework, I will be on my phone checking my messages, checking twitter and Instagram, listening to music, I will talk to the people around me and I will watch videos on YouTube. I can never do one thing at a time, because I get distracted easily. In the documentary, they said that people who multitask do not really move faster and that they are just constantly getting distracted by things and that their memory is disorganized. I have realized in myself that when I try to do homework while doing 100 other things, it does take me much longer to finish my work then it would if I were not doing anything besides my work. You have to focus on one thing at a time and make sure that thing is finished before you move on.

In South Korea the kids will play videogames all day for longs periods of times. Sometimes even a few days in a row and they will not take care of their selves. They will not eat anything or drink anything which will cause their body to shut down and they will die. This is taking playing games to an extreme level. The mother of the child who was playing the games all the time had to ask her son numerous times if he was going to help her out later on in the day. Students in South Korea begin to work with computers around the time they start to read. When I was growing up, I too was taught how to use a computer while in school, but this was not until I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade. In the recent years, children are starting to learn how to use a computer in kindergarten. Some schools even give the students iPads or tables for the school year. This shows how reliant we are on technology because we are teaching children how to work a computer at such young ages.

At a college the professor allowed the students to use their computers during his class because he wanted to see if they were really paying attention to what he was saying during the lecture and if they were doing the required readings that they had to do. Turns out that none of the kids were really paying attention during the lectures and not reading what they needed for the class. When it came in time for the midterms and test, the average score on them were in the low 70’s. This shows how technology can be a distraction at times. There are times when technology can be good and there are also times when technology should be forgotten about. Computers should not be used in the classroom unless the professor can see what is going on on all of the student’s screens, because they could be doing just about anything and not paying attention to what is going on in the class. You go to class to learn things not to just sit there and fool around on the computer. There is a place and time for technology.

In the video they were talking about how technology is a bad thing for us and that we should not be so reliant on it. They compared technology to people texting and driving and to smokers. It said that technology is just as bad as those things and that people do not ever really notice that’s its bad for us until something major happens. It is hard to get someone to stop certain behaviors that they are used to doing all the time. It is something that we get used to using all the time. Everywhere we go, we use some kind of technology, whether it’s from our phone, or computer. Technology is everywhere around us. The video points out how it takes people a while for reality to hit them in the face. You do not know the negative effects of something until one thing happens, and people will not know that they should not always rely on technology for things because soon they will not know how to do anything on their own.

Another thing that the video points out is some peoples relationships with one another are being strengthened or destroyed. Strengthened because some people will find love over the internet and destroyed because there is always drama that happens over the internet or it is taking away family time from some homes. The lady in the beginning of the videos family was very technology prone. Her husband and son were sitting across from each other and they were both on their laptops. Her two youngest children were in the living room taking selfies on her phone and on the computer. This reminded me of my family because every last person in the house has an electronic device of their own. Even the babies have something. There are tablets that are available for children at younger ages that are used as learning devices and as a gaming device. A lot of learning is done through technology.