Digital Nation.

After watching the documentary, “Digital Nation” produced by Rachel Dretzin, my views on the internet and video games definitely altered. Dretzin discusses the substantial increase of internet, cell phone and personal electronic usage. To explain, Rachel Dretzin uses MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because students there are constantly multitasking on multiple different sources of electronics. Numerous MIT students in the video claim there are completely able to multitask, and their work is not affected by it. Until, they are proven differently. To explain, a professor at Stanford University by the name of Clifford Nass tests people’s ability to multi task by performing several different tests. Nass states, “Classic psychology says, that’s impossible! No one can do that. In general, our brains can’t to do two things at once. We want to ask the question, how do they do it? Do they have some secret ingredient, some special ability that psychologists had no idea about, or what’s going on?” From then, Nass carefully selects a group of students from Stanford that are frequent multi-taskers. Brian, a junior at Stanford claims, “I’m watching a YouTube video, I’m checking my email, Nonstop refreshing the page. On facebook, facebook chat … “all so he can “stay connected”. Brian is convinced he is affective in his multi-tasking had no effect. But, his results stated otherwise. Brian’s results revealed that he is slower at completing a task while he is multi tasking, as opposed to him doing the same task consistently. Nass concludes that, “Virtually all multi-taskers think they are brilliant at multi-tasking, and one of the big discoveries is, you know what- you’re really lousy at it.” Aside from school observations regarding multi-taskers, Dretzin also touches base with the video game industry. To explain, games such as World of War Craft, or Second Life. One boy from South Korea plays online games so much his mother states, “When he starts a game, he just doesn’t know when to stop. He plays for hours….I think if I can’t control him right now, I may lose my son. This is an addiction, only an addict can act that way.” Children who are playing games so profusely in South Korea are offered to enter into internet rescue schools. In these schools most of the children who go there have had to seek medical attention prior, due to ear complication and eye strain. I find it ridiculous that people in South Korea or anywhere find themselves attending these types of schools, to help recover them from excessive internet use. I believe children especially in places like this need to be better monitored, so they don’t wind up in such locations.

Rachel Dretzins theory that video games have negative effects on children- is extremely useful because, it puts awareness into the parent’s of these children eyes. To explain, studies have shown that excessive gaming is forcing parents to place their kids into internet rescue schools (like said above) in South Korea. If this problem keeps escalating, more and more children all over the globe are going to be forced into this make believe world of video games, and be placed in rescue schools. I have never been much of a ‘video gamer’, so such things don’t necessarily apply to me, but just hearing about these things really opened my eyes and gave me some instant realization that internet gaming NEEDS to be monitored.