If you are a parent of a school aged
student, you are likely wondering if your children are being negatively
affected from the use of so many technological devices. From cell phones, computers, music devices,
electronic notebooks, Facebook, Twitter, etc., students are likely involved in
their use. Is all of this electronic
interaction negatively impacting students’ attention span, memory skills,
writing and inter-personal communication?
As a parent and educator who has observed
many students throughout my career, just from shear observation it appears that
students today are thwarting their memory skills and their ability to tend to
tasks for any measurable amount of time due to a seemingly addiction to
technology. What began with instant
messaging that hampered students grammar, word usage, sentence construction,
idea development and other components of written language, has now evolved into
the use of various means of social media.
Students are juggling so much input and mental stimuli all at once that
it appears that their attention span is dimensioning as a result.
In regards to memory, gone are the days
of traveling to the local library to research periodicals, books and scholarly
research papers to locate important information. When past generation’s located information in
this way, they took notes and learned the information, preventing them from
having to return to the library if they forgot what was researched. Today’s students visit GOOGLE and other
similar search engines to locate information and have no need to memorize or transcribe
notes because they can search it again in an instant. No doubt there are benefits to the World Wide
Web and having so much information literally at our fingertips, but there are
down sides, too!
According to a research study by Lloyd's
TSB insurance, over the course of the last ten years the average attention span
has dropped from 12 minutes to about 5 minutes from what it was once was. For example, if we are honest, today, we give
a YouTube video only a few seconds to determine if it’s worth watching. Declining attention spans are causing
household accidents such as pans being left to boil over on the stove top, bath
water allowed to overflow, and freezer doors left open, the survey suggests.
But the over-50s are able to concentrate for longer periods than young people,
suggesting that busy lifestyles and intrusive modern technology rather than old
age are to blame for our mental decline. "More than ever, research is
highlighting a trend in reduced attention and concentration spans, and as our
experiment suggests, the younger generation appear to be the worst
afflicted," said sociologist David Moxon, who led the survey of 1,000 people.
A quarter of people polled in the
Lloyd's study said they regularly forget the names of close friends or
relatives, and seven per cent even admitted to momentarily forgetting their own
birthdays. Lack of attention can have a
serious impact on task performance and increases the risk of accidents such as
left pots and pans on the stove top.
Last year more than $1.6 billion dollars of damage was caused by people
not concentrating properly, the research found.
Following are some interesting
and shocking statistics:
* People spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook
each month
* 41.6% of people access emails on
their mobile phones
* Facebook users instill 20 million applications
every day, most of which are distractions
* Social media addiction is real! People report phantom phone vibration,
reaching for a phone that doesn’t exist, fidgeting and restlessness.
* Technology creates interruptions and every
time we are interrupted, our brains must reorient itself on what we were doing
before interrupted.
* The average office worker check his
or her email inbox 30-40 times per hour, once every 1.5 minutes
* 500,000 people join Twitter each day
* 12 millions twitter users following
64 of more twitter accounts.
If you would like to share what you are
doing in your family to prevent the symptoms described above of excessive use
of technology, please email them to me at carol@totallearningconcepts.com. We
have a responsibility as parents, grandparents, and adult mentors to train
young people in ways that will benefit them throughout their lifetime as they
prepare for college and a career.