Growing Up Digital Wired For Distraction Analysis

Throughout the past decade, it has become very apparent that people of this generation have become dependent upon technology. In the article “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era” by Richard Restak, he takes the stance that people are clinging to technology because of our fast-paced way of life. In Alexandra Samuel’s “‘Plug in Better’: A Manifesto” she argues that “our growing time online is diminishing both our individual intellects and our collective capacity for connection.” In the article “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” by Matt Richtel, he provides an example of a high school boy who shows how his growing up online has contributed to his bad grades throughout school. People in this generation have become so reliant

People feel it is an easier way to get things done. Also that when faced with many things to do it helps in allowing for shortcuts. But is this shortcut in our face-paced life actually efficient? In today’s day individuals are in a constant state of motion causing them to have to be in more than one place at once or causing them to have do more than one thing at one time. Technology that has been made prevalent around us has been created to help us deal with these multiple tasks at once. Restak takes the stance in his article “People have always been required to do more than one thing at a time or think of more than one thing at a time. But even when engaged in what we now call multitasking, most people maintained a strong sense of unity: They remained fully grounded in terms of what they were doing. Today the sense of unity has been replaced, I believe, by the feelings of distraction and difficulty maintaining focus and attention.” What Restak is saying in this quote is that multitasking with technology causes the brain to lose concentration when it comes to focusing on a task at hand. It has an abundance of stimulation coming from many different sources that it requires the brain to constantly split its attention among many things which, in turn, puts strain on the brain. Not only that, but it causes our brains to perform tasks with reduced

In the article by Matt Richtel he provides the example of a boy named Vishal who continues to struggle during school because of his current state of wanting to always be on Facebook and play video games. In the article a kid that was interviewed said “He was playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice.” This example is showing how once this child has wrapped his everyday life around this kind of habit he finds it hard to relax and bring it back in order to focus on his studies, therefore putting a negative effect on his academics. One of the biggest problems for kids of this generation is that they are raised on technology. For example, when a toddler most of the time they are put in some sort of daycare in order to be taken care of while their parents are at work. Well when finally picked up the parent most likely will have things to do at home for work that require that parents full attention. In most cases the parent will set their child up with some sort of tablet or ipad in order to keep the child occupied and have that act as a babysitter. Having grown up in these situations forces the kids to have formed bad habits for when they get home from school later in