“Digital Nation,” written by Douglas Rushkoff and Rachel Dretzin, is a video that talks about how we (the today generation) are constantly multitasking with ‘tech tools’ and are immersed with technologies. This puts us almost into different worlds. Rushkoff and Dretzin did a study on the campus of the Mass. Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The M.I.T. students are the world’s smartest and most wired. Dretzin saw that everywhere she looked on the campus that “students were always looking at a screen, sometimes multiple screens.” This could possibly be a result for how busy these students are all the time so they are distracted by everything else. The students think they are completely capable of multitasking. In California, they did a study at Stanford where they discovered that they get super distracted and lose their focus easily. They discovered this through mind tests on carefully chosen students where they identify numbers as odd or even, letters as vowels or constantans, but its full of distractions. With NASA testing them on how fast they can switch between tasks without losing their focus. Virtually they were slower at multitasking. Dr. Gary Small at UCLA discovered that using the Internet compared to reading a book uses more brain energy and decision-making but isn’t necessarily good. Small found out that many kids in Asia are addicted to video games, especially in South Korea. “PC bombs are a big gaming craze there, where cheep high-speed Internet is offered and can be accessed twenty four seven at over a thousand spots to the tens of thousands of kids, so they can play video games all day or all night,” explains Rushkoff. They met a fifteen year old, who told them how he plays seven to eight hours a day and stays up on weekends to play video games. This resulted in his mother sending him to an Internet Rescue School for two weeks. The Korean elementary schools teach kids how to use computers responsibly starting in second grade. Some middle schools require lab tops and Dretzin sent her oldest son to one of these schools. The virtual worlds are becoming more and more used to create a new reality and many people are playing these types of online universes. Some companies use virtual worlds to communicate and they have never met before. Also, virtual world gamers talk to one another without meeting for a long period of time over the net. The U.S. military also uses virtual spaces for PTSD therapy and for flying drones in Iraq on a base in Nevada.
I agree that the today generation is trying too hard to multitask and is using the net a little more often than needed. This makes us less focused and addicted. It seems as if we are learning through video games to a sense. This point needs emphasizing since so many people still believe that we are immune to this happening to us. I’ve noticed that the Internet or technologies have affected my life. There isn’t a lot of reason as to how this came to be but I seem to need the technologies of today to get through each day. In the video, students are not aware that their multitasking isn’t improving their skills but lessening them in many ways. They are less focused and distracted more easily. I can relate to this because I get easily distracted and when I’m online I tend to be less focused and my mind is all over the place. I also realize as I watched this video again and as I write this, that I am multitasking or at least trying to and it isn’t helping my focus at all. Then as the video talked about the video games and virtual worlds, people are not realizing that they are getting addicted to these things when in reality it’s all they think about. Personally, I can’t relate to this because I think video games are a waste of time and that instead of going onto virtual worlds, I rather live my life here on earth as myself, no avatars or any virtual people to express me as a person. I can see though why all the people who use these do because they have nothing better to do and I guess they could be fun. All in all, the technologies we use on a day-to-day basis are making us almost less sociable and comfortable. We need these technologies to get by. It seems as if we are addicted to all technologies that we can have access to.
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