The video, Digital Nation is a 90-minute documentary on digital media. It was produced by Rachel Dretzin who teamed up with one of the leading thinkers of digital age, Douglas Rushkoff to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. This documentary film tells a story about how everyone is completely immersed in technology all the time and survey whether our 24/7 wired world is causing us to lose as much as we have gained. Dretzin and Rushkoff begin their exploration in M.I.T. (Massachesetts Institute of Technology) campus where students are among the World’s smartest and most wired. They see staggering amount of students who are constantly multitasking with their tech tools; distracted by everything. They question what multitasking is doing to the students’ brains. Dretzin and Rushkoff asked professor Clifford Nass at Stanford University who presented tests to some selected “Multitaskers” to examine how these students are really good at it. The results yield troubling discoveries; students were not effective as they thought they were in multitasking, they were terrible at it and were in fact slower when switching tasks. Rushkoff goes to South Korea, where playing online in that country is a craze for many youth. These online gamers are so obsessed with their Internet games that their addiction has affected their health. Many cannot unplug themselves from their digital life that they forget to attend to their body’s basic needs. This suggest, being wired 24/7 like this in the digital world can present a threat to people’s mind and body especially for those who simply cannot unplug themselves from the virtual world. In Chatham High School (in New Jersey) however, teachers are embracing the digital media because it keeps students engaged. Their results found that the use of technology in teaching has helped boost students’ attendance and test scores. Jason Levy, a Principal of a middle school in New York South Bronx says, “Technology is like oxygen to the kids.” Here in the Bronx where most of the kids were not engaged in school at all before, providing technology has clearly been a Net gain. M.I.T students on the other hand confess that in their case it is a Net loss. They confirm because of constant interruption, it has affected their reading and writing.
As the documentary video presented interviews with MIT students, scholars and die-hard World of Warcraft and Second Life players talking about heavy media use, the point is clear that people are wired all the time. I agree that young people use an awful lot of media, and in some ways it distracts them from their studies, but in other ways using media may make students more focused. I believe young people are where they exactly want to be. Technology can be to one’s own disadvantage and advantage. Technology like the online media offers a lot of learning tools and it is up to the kids how they want to take advantage of these offerings and tools. Although the online media also presents entertainment of all sorts like online gaming for example, again it is up to the kids how they want to respond. There are beneficial things to do online like read news, ‘google’ subjects or issues, utilize the online encyclopedias, create blogs, email friends and colleagues etc. I do understand and concede that technology also has its negative influence. The power of entertainment especially can attract kids today and cause them to allocate more time on technology’s pleasurable activities as opposed to school work or constructive online media activities. But I reiterate that Technology can be to one’s own advantage or disadvantage. Perhaps the main concern here is how to make use of the technology given at hand.
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