Living in a digital age...

The program Frontline did a piece on what is happening to people around the world living in this new digital age. The program explored both pluses and minuses of the use of technology in today's society. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students are constantly multitasking while they are at school. They are talking to one person while texting another person and sending an e-mail to someone else. The professors said that the students are becoming too distracted in class doing other things than listening to the lectures.

At Stanford University in California they conducted a study on the students. They found that while multitasking the students actually worked slower than when they only did on task at a time. They became so distracted by doing many things at once it look them longer to do any one task by itself. Researchers say it is hard to conduct studies on the impact of technology on people because it changes so rapidly that you can not monitor the effects on people. The government of South Korea is so concerned about the growing crisis that they have called gaming an addiction and a mental health crisis. They have sent up rehabilitation centers around the country to try to deal with the effects of long term gaming use by youth in the country.

A Junior High School in the Bronx is has used computer laptops given to students to raise the grades of the students and lower the violence at the school. People play the MMO game World of Warcraft and meet people from all over the world and some even have real world relationships with people they meet in the game. Some companies like IBM have used virtual worlds like Second Life to hold meetings and cut down travel costs. They think that meeting in the virtual world actually leads to closer interaction and relations than meeting other ways. The U.S. Military uses remote unmanned airplanes to conduct air strikes in foreign countries. The pilots are able to drop bombs on terror suspects and than drive home from work for dinner.

The program was very interesting. It showed both the good and the bad side of technology. Many advances have been made using new technology but other things have also been lost. When people changed from the spoken word to writing words we lost some of our memory capability. Since we have moved from a written word to using e-mail and texting some feel we have lost our ability to write. I think that with technology like anything else in life moderation is key and you should not be afraid of new things but do not toss the old things away too quickly.