Digital Nation Analysis
Digital Nation or Digital Disaster?
In the Frontline video titled Digital Nation, Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff explored the impact of digital media on today’s society. In the video they cover everything from it’s impact on the brain, to it’s impact on students, to it’s impact on the military. Nothing is spared in this investigation on the effect of digital media, and growing up in a wired world. However the main thing I managed to take away from this film was it has had a dramatic effect on human abilities and communication, which I will be discussing in the following paragraphs.
The first, and what I believe to be the most significant impact our technological environment has made, is the damage it has caused for human capabilities. In the video Dretzin and Rushkoff visit MIT to interview students about multi-tasking and what the students believe about the quality of their own work when multi-tasking. Not surprisingly, most of them believed they could maintain the quality of their work, even while performing several other actions simultaneously. However after testing some of the best multi-tasking students, the results proved otherwise. Students’ quality of work and their speed at which they can complete tasks were obviously impaired. Which, leads me to another impairment, I believe is caused by being so tech-savvy, our attention spans. Another point brought up in the video, is the decreasing attention span of technology users everywhere. Our ability to retrieve almost any information with touch of a couple buttons has caused us to lose our focus. With many devices, come many distractions. I myself am I even fighting the urge to check up on all my social media outlets, as I am writing this essay. So from personal experience I can say that all this technology has definitely made a huge impact on my attention span, work habits, and quality of work. I believe technology has had the same negative impact on the rest of my generation as well.
The other aspect
In the Frontline video titled Digital Nation, Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff explored the impact of digital media on today’s society. In the video they cover everything from it’s impact on the brain, to it’s impact on students, to it’s impact on the military. Nothing is spared in this investigation on the effect of digital media, and growing up in a wired world. However the main thing I managed to take away from this film was it has had a dramatic effect on human abilities and communication, which I will be discussing in the following paragraphs.
The first, and what I believe to be the most significant impact our technological environment has made, is the damage it has caused for human capabilities. In the video Dretzin and Rushkoff visit MIT to interview students about multi-tasking and what the students believe about the quality of their own work when multi-tasking. Not surprisingly, most of them believed they could maintain the quality of their work, even while performing several other actions simultaneously. However after testing some of the best multi-tasking students, the results proved otherwise. Students’ quality of work and their speed at which they can complete tasks were obviously impaired. Which, leads me to another impairment, I believe is caused by being so tech-savvy, our attention spans. Another point brought up in the video, is the decreasing attention span of technology users everywhere. Our ability to retrieve almost any information with touch of a couple buttons has caused us to lose our focus. With many devices, come many distractions. I myself am I even fighting the urge to check up on all my social media outlets, as I am writing this essay. So from personal experience I can say that all this technology has definitely made a huge impact on my attention span, work habits, and quality of work. I believe technology has had the same negative impact on the rest of my generation as well.
The other aspect