Monday, April 18, 2011

Technology Diet?

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation released in January 2010 concluded that 8- to 18-year-olds devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to entertainment media per day. But because they dedicate so much of that time using more than one medium at once - say, scanning Facebook as they listen to music and chat with friends - they actually pack in about 10 hours and 45 minutes of content in that period..............A team at UCSF published a study last week that found further evidence that multitasking impedes short-term memory, especially among older adults. Researchers there previously found that distractions of the sort that smart phones and social networks present can hinder long-term memory and mental performance.

Are we becoming a society of abstract thinkers, who can be easily distracted by enormous information made available in this digital age? The beauty of abundance of information, is that we can attempt to find solutions to our problem easily, if we focus at the particular problem. The curse of it all is, we do not get to focus at any problem at all. When too much information become distraction, it is fair to ask if we have the ability to filter out the information we think it is not important. Or we will just spend our online time reading into useless tweets and feeding into narcissistic facebook/blog posts?

Money quote

More and more, society is looking like a chat room


Read the rest of the article here.

No comments: