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Technolgoies
Takeover
tech
Just a few decades ago none of us had access to the amount of technology available today, even basic computers were out of most people’s reach but now they fit into the palms of our hands.They have transformed the way we live, from our personal relationships to our working habits, but has the balance tipped too far; have we become slaves to the screen? Jonathan meets Katie and Stuart Brown both 26-years old and new parents to baby Willow. Katie admits to being a social networking addict and can be online for up to 12 hours a day, while husband Stuart is a keen online gamer. The couple recognise that their time spent online is having an impact on their relationship. In order to discover whether their relationship would improve without their gadgets we decided to pull the plug on their digital world.For one weekend there would be no virtual worlds, texts, tweets or updates, laptops, mobile phones, games consoles and the internet.We find out how
they fare after their digital detox! Katie and Stuart face up to a weekend without their gadgets Jonathan talks to leading neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield to examine what impact tec Mike has agreed that things need to change so he has asked work psychologist Professor Cary Cooper from Lancaster University to help reduce his team’s reliance on their gadgets. For one week in this office there will be no internal email and working outside of office hours will be banned. Will a week without email prove to be too much for Mike’s employees?But for growing numbers of people technology is an in-
tegral and much welcomed part of life, with many prepared to go to great lengths to get their hands on the latest piece of kit. Now more than 40% oadults and 60% of teenagers own a smartphone, more a hand-held computer than a phone. onathan meets Dan
temis
D e s t r o y i n g
H o w
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s o c i a l i z e
In a world so caught up in social media, in the words of a great video I watched recently, it’s anything but social. We stick our noses so far into our phones we don’t bother to look up and enjoy the world around us. Crystal and I would waste 30 minutes or more sitting next to each other without talking while surfing Facebook on our phones. We spend so much time on our computers, phones, wasting hours of our days reading meaningless crap about people we don’t even talk to. Let that sink in for a minute. Is it nice to see what friends are up to? Sure! But why not actually socialize with them using, I don’t know, your words? Call them, text them, or even better go spend time with them in person. You don’t ever really see the true side to someone on
their Facebook profile. You see a image that they want you to believe is their life. On the surface you see that I have a wonderful family, a adorable kid, and a great life. But what about my personal stuggles? I don’t put them on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You have to actually get to know ME if you want to know all sides of me. This waste of time has brought Crystal an I to realize that there is more to life than the internet and social media, cable television and being lazy. We want to live a more full and rich life that we won’t accomplish by sitting on our butts reading about what someone thinks about politics, or what you had for lunch. That in NO way benefits us! (Unless your lunch looked bomb, then we might ask for the recipe).
Taking over our Minds
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework. On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate Students have always facedistractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning. Researchers say the lure othese technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can
become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention. “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia cente proficiency with them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.
He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francis-
co airport, build her own Web and regularly send his film to
“He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one that is virtual and one with real-life demands.