Technology And Technology : The Use Of Technology

Technology is as much of a distraction as it is an asset. It took me 30 minutes to begin this essay because my phone is right next to me, and I got a text. A single message turned into a full conversation along with an update on multiple social media apps. I was annoyed with my phone because it distracted me from my essay, but how could I stay mad at something so important to me? Without my phone I doubt I could be a functioning adult. I couldn’t have bought my Starbucks this morning, I used the mobile app, and I couldn’t have boarded my plane, my boarding pass was sent to my email, and I couldn’t have called an Uber to get back to school.

"The Kaiser Family Foundation last year found that school-age kids spend an average of 7 1/2 hours a day in front of a television, a smartphone, or another digital device"(Rosen).

Media culture and technologies influence on curriculum in the classroom over the last 20 years has been astronomical. The increase in the use of multimedia and technology in our everyday lives has become a major influencer on the way students and teachers navigate within their classrooms. This has created a sense of urgency to incorporate this new tech culture into the classroom. With so many advancements and ideas for the facilitation of technology in the classroom, there are a number of seemingly outlying factors that contribute to technologies successful incorporation and use. When technology is seen as a valuable collaborative tool in the eyes of the students and educators it can aid in student learning, understanding, and lesson facilitation. When technology is not seen as a valuable collaborative tool its implementation and use is stagnant. The perception and attitudes of teachers play a major role in the success or failure of the introduction and implementation of technology in classroom.

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” questions the motif of technology and if it is making us smarter or if it has made us so dependent on technology and its facility to do things that we are losing our own ability. Carr asserts “my mind expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles… The more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing,” to emphasize the detriments technology has created and its constant environment of perpetual interference. Though because of technology, and the internet, people have become more efficient and are able to attain information faster. Carr concludes that some people tend to forget is that information is not knowledge, that knowledge is the transfer for short memory to long term memory, and the problem is that people tend to take in too much too fast, and overload the short term memory with constant new information and push out other short term memory to make room. But

Nicholas Carr, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” believed that as technology improves, we lose a little bit of ourselves in the process. I think that he is right, as I look around I see people not even able to hold a conversation without looking at their phone or tablets. Practices that used to be a normal thing people learned before technology improves, now people rely on their phone to do those things now. The days where people had to remember phone number and birthdays are over, those things are now programed into cell phone and electronic calendars. Only a few years ago people had to go to the library to get information and we would remember that information for some time, for these reasons I believe that technology is making people dumber and dumber.

“The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”(Carr, 315). This quote from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” gives us an idea on how the internet really changes our habits. Our minds go from being able to concentrate and thinking through problems to relying on google to find a simple solution. We may even count this as lazy as Squarciafico worried that technology would lead to intellectual laziness (Carr, 326). I agree with Squarcifico. Even Carr stated, “…there’s a countertendency to expect

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.” Harris uses this quote from James Gleick to introduce the topic of memory in his book. Harris (2014) asserts that with the constant connection of the internet, people are memorizing less info and “off-loading” memories onto their devices. “Human memory was never meant to call up all things, after all, but rather to explore the richness of exclusion, of absence.” (pg. 164) With new technology it is possible to know almost everything with the click of a button. Within seconds we can search for a friend’s birthday or the name of that cast member on our favorite show. We have “the illusion of knowledge” which brings up the question of what do we truly know as compared to that of a computer? Human memory is substantially different from that of computers. While a computer's entire memory could be concentrated down to ones and zeroes, the human mind is much more complex, relying on certain instances for us to recall our memories. “Memory is a lived, morphing experience...not some static file from which we withdraw the same data time and again.” (Harris, 2014, pg.

Young people spend 27 or more hours a week on the Internet (Anderson). As society moves on, technology will keep diffusing and changing drastically; opening more possibilities for newer and undiscovered innovations to take over. Technology can be found anywhere from phones to cars that people drive every day. As technology advances, scientists and doctors have started an altercation between those who believe new tech will teach communities and strengthen our knowledge and others who believe that inventing untested gadgets will only corrupt the nation and affect students at work. Although people view technology as an important tool of the future, technology can be more harmful to society as students become distracted, leading to health concerns, and influencing people to cyberbully.

Tracy Packiam Alloway, a psychology professor at the University of North Florida, presents an argument as to why she believes technology is not making us lazy, but is actually making us more efficient. Alloway speaks of a study she did on several hundred people where she analyzed how technology has altered the way those people “remember and process” information (Alloway 1). After a series of questions, Alloway identified which people were active users of technology and which ones were passive users. She determined technology does indeed have a significant effect on the operation of our brains; however, it is not a negative one. The study showed active users of technology were much better at focusing on multiple pieces of information at once, easily adapting to any sort of change in the information, while passive users “processed information successively and found it easier to focus on a single target at a time” (Alloway 1). Therefore, Alloway determined technology does the opposite of limiting our progress, for it gives a better opportunity to multitask. She argues new developments, such as Google, simply provided quicker access to new information, rather than wasting hours trying to find the information. Although, Alloway does admit we will still always need to know how to use the information. Knowing the information is simply not enough, so despite the emergence of technology, we will still have to know how to achieve certain tasks ourselves. In her concluding statements, Alloway says, “Instead of having to fill up our mental ‘space’ with lots of information, this space is now freed up to focus on other things” (Alloway 1). In short, Alloway believes technology does not diminish our level of efficiency but enhances

Americans use technology every single day whether it be for business or leisure purposes. Because of this daily usage Americans’ reliance on technology increases exceedingly each day. Even though a machine may be able to complete a task twice as fast as a human, banking upon a machine is a very foolhardy decision. Not only does it yield torpid employees; but in the case the machine happens to break down, there is a high probability the employees will be inexperienced and have trivial knowledge on how to take on the position of the apparatus thus resulting in a massive decrease in production within that establishment. We have also become inactive people. In an article titled “11 Ways Tech has made Us Lazy” by Sherilynn

What are smart devices? “A smart device is an electronic device, generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols such as Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi, 3G, etc., that can operate, to some extent, interactively and autonomously”(Weiser). There has been a debate for years on whether or not technology impairs users from performing daily tasks and whether it is has become too much to handle. Technology is a very important and helpful aid to an individual’s every day life. Although some might see it as a distraction, the number of ways in which technology has advanced our capabilities, effectiveness and knowledge is enough to sink most opposing arguments. Technology has created a very different society completely changing the very concept of accessibility, making information available at almost any time and anyplace.

The article, “Is Google making us stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr states that technology has changed our living styles over years. He talks from the use of clocks to computers in each and every situation. This article introduces how the internet or technology has affected our brains. “The deep reading that used to comes naturally has become a struggle” (Carr 2) proves the idea behind writing this article. From past experience Carr explains that we used to read long articles and book without getting distracted, but now we feel the most difficult job to do. That’s because of internet that is taking over humans. Carr states that human brain is malleable, and it can also change the impression that is created by internet. Carr believes our brains are not like hard drives, or refrigerators that can get overstuffed so there's no more room. In contrast, he says they expand: "It's not as if remembering and thinking are separate processes. The more things you remember, the more material you have to work on, the more interesting your thoughts are likely to be," he says

Technology is slowly diminishing our cognitive reasoning and motor skills. Technology negatively establishes new diverse connections in our brains; rearranging our thinking thoughts into different processes. To clarify, these connections disintegrate the process of new ideas in a form that the simple reaction would be “google something” rather than actually process and formulate concrete ideas. Technology shuts down the human curiosity of exploration and the fruitful harvest of finding new information from effort. This derives from constantly having the answer right at our disposal. Nicholas Carr in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” writes “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping

It has become a habit for Americans to rely on the internet for any information they may need. The ability to find answers immediately is changing the thought process of the brain, and hindering long term memory. Rather than retaining and storing information in the brain, people tend to simply “Google it” because they have the worlds knowledge at their fingertips. When we look up information online instead of figuring the problem out ourselves, it causes us to think more shallow minded. A recent survey was examined that explored how most people can not recall even the simplest pieces of information, such as a phone number. (Rodriquez) It was shown that over 35% of people do not know their spouses phone number by heart, and over 50% cannot recall their own employers number. It became clear that “our reliance on technology is damaging our ability to remember boilerplate information from our daily lives.” (Rodriquez)

In modern era, almost every single person in the world has a cellular device that can conveniently sit in a pocket and give someone the ability to speak to anyone they know across the globe. Along with that, many of those devices have access to internet – allowing access to an infinite amount of information to gather with just a tap of a screen. Many different tasks can now be conducted or organized just by using a 5-inch phone in the palm of your hand. Worldwide instant communication is not the only amazing feat people have obtained: planes carry people and cargo hundreds of miles per hour around the world, electricity and water are directly installed into most homes, and people can casually travel many miles a day using one of thousands of different kinds of vehicles. As the world continues to grow, technology further expands to achieve things that many people wouldn’t have believed possible. A century ago, most people wouldn’t be able to imagine the world we live in today.