Digital Nation Report

     After watching the video “Digital Nation” produced by Rachel Dretzin, I was able to get insight on effect technology has on many of people throughout the world.  According to Dretzin and her research we are immersed in technology all the time, from multitasking, to the military, in work, and at play.  She realized it for the first time when she noticed that everyone in her house was on some kind of technology.  “It just hit me. We're all in the same house, but we're also in other worlds. And I don't know, it just kind of snuck up on us. I didn't see it coming.”  That is what gave her an idea to find out how much the rest of the world is involved in technology and how it is affecting them.  First she and her friend Douglas Rushkoff take a look at how is effecting students’ lives.   They start at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge where determine through a controlled experiment that tech. is creating people unable to think well and end up in Korea where Rushkoff meets Chung Young, a 15-year-old boy who spends up to 7-8 hours on the computer every day.  According to a doctor in Korea, some kids have every died because they spend so much time in front of a computer and don’t hydrate or feed themselves. For a lot of people technology is their oxygen, they can’t live without it, some people use computer games to hold company meetings, so they don’t have to spend money to fly out and be there.  Others use games in technology, like World of Warcraft, to meet people of any kind and form a friendship through the game.  Either way you look at it technology has both a negative and a positive side to it.  

     I don’t know whether to agree or disagree with what Rachel Dretzin is trying to tell her viewers.  There is not a problem with using technology for work and/or pleasure, but there is a line of too much technology that many people cross.  I, myself rarely ever use technology so I only have probably 3-5 hours under my belt at the end of the week, but Professor Sherry Turkle at MIT says it well when she suggests to us that, “Technology isn't good or bad, it's powerful and it's complicated. Take advantage of what it can do. Learn what it can do. But also ask, "What is it doing to us?" ”  In other word, people should be more careful about how much time they send using technology because if they’re not, it could pull them into it’s vortex of addiction and they might never be able to pull themselves back out.  I don’t think I will ever have that problem because the only time I really use technology is when I go on the computer is to do homework and watch a movie during family night.  But I can’t see ten years down the road so I don’t know for certain how technology will affect me.  And it’s not the technology’s fault for humans becoming addicted and not being able to live without it, it’s theirs.  Who knows how it will affect us, Rachel Dretzin tells us, “It may be too early to know the answer.”  She is probably right, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start now to change the outcome.