The Polarity Of College Students

Imagine having to turn off all electronics and not being able to use it for a week. Technologies, such as the Internet, have provoked questions about the effects it has to students overtime. Although Internet users have become dependent to the internet, schools should not participate in national “Shut Down Your Screen Week” because the Internet is an exceptional source of information, the Internet is used for instant communication, and Internet users have shown increased signs of social interactions.

Lauren Shinozuka wrote “The Dangers of Digital Distractedness” for a class assignment. She is a college student that lives in the world of technology and internet. Her idea to address how dependent the world has become on technology without even realizing it. Lead her to her own evaluation of her life and how technology has changed how she deals and interacts with people.

“In 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended” (Turkle). As technology keeps growing and growing we find that it has an effect on many things. Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle’s articles both relate to how Google is effect many people today. However, Carr’s article focuses more on how it is affected our ability to concentrate and contemplate, while Turkle’s article shows how we have lost the ability to connect with others.

Even though smart phones are supposed to make working easier, studies have shown that they actually hurt our performance. In 2015, a Journal of Experimental Psychology study had 166 people to test. The experiment was to have the participants work on a challenging task while their phones start beeping and buzzing. The results showed that the worker became messier and had their attention elsewhere, whether or not they checked their phone. Dr. Adrian Ward is a psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, he has been working with the effects of smart phones on our thoughts and decision making. Dr. Ward believes that we have grown so attached to our phones that they reduce our intelligence with their presence. To test this theory, Dr. Ward and three colleagues began a clever experiment to test his idea. They decided to enlist 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and make them perform two standard tests of intellectual acuity. The first test evaluated “available cognitive capacity”, it’s a test to measure how fully a person’s mind can focus on a single task. The second test gauged “fluid intelligence”, a person’s ability to understand and answer an unfamiliar problem. The only difference was the location of the student’s smart phone. Some students had their phone on the desk, while others had it in their bag or pocket. Others were even asked to leave their phone in a different room. The results of this test showed that “As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased” (pg.3).

We live in a world filled with technology. School teachers and college professors use technology to give lectures, health care professionals use technology to keep medical records, or monitor patient’s vital signs, we use technology such as social media, to connect with people and gain acceptance. In 2014, Gary Turk posted a video to Youtube titled Look Up, in which he argues that technology, such as smartphones, causes us to miss out on certain things in life, because we don’t use it in moderation. Technology benefits our lives by making us more efficient in our professional and personal activities.

In the section titled The Dumbest Generation, “Digital Nation” lays out a haunting narrative describing technology’s negative impact on students today. This section draws from an interview with Mark Bauerlein, a professor and author of book titled “The Dumbest Generation.” Bauerlein claims that reading, writing and math skills of students have all already began to deteriorate. It seems that constant interruption and attempts to multitask are at the heart of this deterioration. I received my first smart phone just before the beginning of this semester, from my own experience I can only agree with the assertion that technology puts a damper on the educational experience. The issue does not come with the technology itself, rather, the desire for constant connection distracts from the learning experience. As the first generation of persons who grew up with technology become parents, I hope they can teach their children the skill of moderation and the importance of education – skills often not taught to kids today by their parents born before the technology boom. These ideas will solve the deterioration of reading, writing, and math that Bauerlein speaks

For their research project, "We brought awareness to the about the excessive use of internet use through our cell phones and social media apps,” explained Lopez, “excessive use that is non-productive, that has nothing to do with homework.”

Adrian Ward, a psychologist and marketing professor, suggest that “using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job.” Indeed it does, as soon as the phone rings and we can’t answer it, our blood pressure increases, and our problem-solving skills decline because our focus is now on it forever. A team of researchers, led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, says because search engines are available forever, we are “in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.” Search engines are what’s making us idle.

Many college students, such as myself, have experienced group polarization quite a few times in their college lives. Group polarization occurs several times in college because of how often students discuss their beliefs in classrooms, clubs, sororities and fraternities and even in the work place. Although I have experienced group polarization countless times in college, there was one instance that stood out from the rest.

In the article titled “The Digital Identity Divide: How Technology Knowledge Impacts College Students” written by Joanne Goode , it is important for users to understand the use of “technology identity”as an accurate way to measure the digital divide amongst college level students. Goode argues that “ knowing how to utilize the technological ecosystem of university life is certainly critical for academic success”(Goode, 498). Therefore, students that possesess more technological knowledge succeed within these academics climates due to experience , thus levels of increased mastery. Where as students that posseses no prior technical knowledge consequently struggle with not only the pace of the course workload , but also are extremely disadvantaged

Throughout the day college students, high school students, middle school students and increasing number of elementary school students are constantly found on cell phones, lap tops, ipod, and ipads. They constantly text, email, instant message, instagram, and facebook, looking for anyway to become

Today, many campuses offer free Wi-Fi internet access in all classrooms. However, students abuse the advantage of Wi-Fi internet availability and misuse their laptops in ways that prevents them to engage and concentrate in class. Carrie B. Fried’s points out that although her research demonstrated that laptops are an effective learning tool, there was more suggestive evidence to ban laptops in class because they detract students from learning. Based on her research results, she concluded that students learning are negatively related to in-class laptop use because students spent “considerable time multitasking and that laptop use posed a significant distraction to both users and fellow students” (Computers and Technologies Journal). With Wi-Fi networks, it allows students to use the internet and do non-course related activities: check emails, play online games, visit social media networks such as Facebook and Blogger, and instant message other friends inside and outside of their current classroom. Students performing non course related activities on their laptops distract their fellow classmates as well. A student who misuses their laptop hinders their own learning as well as the learning of peers who are using their laptops appropriately. A student watching a comedy and smiling can distract another classmates’ learning and the disrespect the professor who is struggling to teach.

Thousands of websites are distracting students from studying time. In an experiment at Cornell University, students who used internet-connected laptops during a lecture did much worse on a subsequent test than students who did not use the internet (Carr, 2010). It indicated that using the internet in class impacts students’ attention span (2010). Distractions can take attention away from learning. In fact, using the internet does not promote study efficiency, but wastes time.

The article focuses on the distraction of mobile devices in the college classroom. Brenner explains that they are distracting to not only the person using them, but the people around them as well. Through her research, she found that the people sitting next to multitaskers on their laptops tended to score lower on tests than those without the distraction. On that note, she states that people “are not wired to multi task”. Through a study, she found that texting during lectures caused a decrease in student’s ability to take notes, pay attention, and perform well on tests. She also found that the use of laptops

If I were to ask each of you if you were able to go an entire day without your mobile device, very few can say they`d be able to do so. In fact, in a recent TIME Magazine Mobility Poll, 84% out of 5000 people surveyed in 8 different countires, admitted that they couldn’t go a single day without their phones and a third of respondents admitted that being without their mobile device for even short periods of time leaves them feeling anxious. It is clear that whenever we`re waiting for those last five minutes before the bell rings to every class, our automatic impulse is to reach for our phone. Do you really need to check anything that important? The sad truth is that we have become far too dependent on our phones. The fear that we might miss the latest gossip, or the most recent updates on all of our social webesites seems more like an addiction than anything else. We`ve clouded our vision as to what is really important, and that is-quality human interaction.