Popular singer and actress, Monica Denise Brown, once said, “Multitasking is part of my everyday life”. This quote is not powerful in any means, just simply true. Everybody multitasks, it it part of daily life. However, an author, Alina Tugend, wrote an article titled “Multitasking Can Make You Lose Umm… Focus” where she discusses many aspects and sciences behind the negatives of multitasking. Within the article, several different points are covered that show the reasons that people should not multitask. The points that Tugend made in the article were not the most structured ideas and some could be disagreed with. In the beginning of the article, Tugend’s thesis suggests that multitasking can save time but can also put people under …show more content…
Tugend begins to talk a little bit about how multitasking has changed since our world has become more advanced. She mentions corded phones and how they required people to stand or sit stationary without allowing them too much room to move around. Now however, people can freely walk around with their cell phones and they have the freedom to do whatever they wish while they talk. Who knows where this whole argument was going though, as society has not used corded phones in decades. On top of that, what person makes food, or cleans the house, or just simply multitasks while talking on the phone, what really is that distracting them from? If they have an important call, why would they be cooking dinner. More than likely that is just an assumption. From here she moves on to talk about a study published within the Journal of Experimental Psychology that did not have many solid points going along with it. They gave several testers sample tasks and tested the amount of time it took to switch in between them. She does not go into much detail about it and it just left it off by saying it took longer to switch in between harder tasks. After that, Tugend brings up another study that was done by the RAC Foundation, which is a British nonprofit that focuses on driving issues. In the study, RAC asked 17 to 24 year old drivers to participate in a texting and driving simulator. The RAC found that drivers reacted 35 percent slower when they were using phones and driving compared to normal driving. Everyone should be able to agree, there are many things people should not multitask with. These not only include driving, but in general, all dangerous tasks that require lots of undivided attention. So while it may be agreed upon that multitasking while driving is dangerous, it is illegal for a reason, the point is not very relevant. Here, Tugend came to the end of the second section of
As human beings, it is becoming more of a second nature to us to multi-task. As the world is technologically advancing more and more every day, there are becoming more distractions. Social-media is flourishing, reality TV show ratings are going up, and humans even unintentionally check their phones every two minutes. In this day of age, multi-tasking is proving to promote inefficiency rather than productivity.
In the article, “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” Alina Tugend centralizes around the negative effects of multitasking. She shows that often with multitasking, people tend to lose focus, lack work quality, have an increase in stress, and in the end she gives a solution to all these problems. Tugend conveys her points by using understandable language, a clear division of subjects, and many reliable sources, making her article cogent.
Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to a large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study “Your Brain on Computers” reports that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, is claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. (Crovitz 353) As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distr...
In the chapter “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era,” from The New Brain, written by Richard Restak, Restak makes some very good points on his view of multitasking and modern technology. He argues that multitasking is very inefficient and that our modern technology is making our minds weaker. Multitasking and modern technology is causing people to care too much what other people think of them, to not be able to focus on one topic, and to not be able to think for themselves.
The several effects of distracted driving are deadly. Andrew Lavallee points out that “texting while driving is unsafe. Not only are a driver’s eyes off the road, one or both hands are off the wheel.” “We think it is incompatible with safe driving” (qtd. in Lavallee). “Study upon study showed that talking on a cellphone was far more dangerous than she’d realized – that a driver on a phone had the same reaction speed as someone legally intoxicated, that those talking on a phone behind the wheel are four times as likely to crash” (qtd. in Hanes). Stephanie Hanes also mentions that, “Unlike a conversation with a passenger, the electronic conversation takes a driver into a virtual space away from the road.” Subsequently, this causes severe problems and deadly
In the article,“Multitasking is actually kind of a problem for kids and adults” by Hayley Tsukayama the author went into detail about how parents and their children view their personal media habits. One of the ways that the parents and children viewed their media habits as was feeling the need to respond to texts and notifications immediately. “More than 1,200 parents and teens surveyed, 48 percent of parents and 72 percent of teens said they felt the need to respond to texts and notifications immediately, almost guaranteeing distractions throughout the day” (Tsukayama). This article can be connected to “The Epidemic of Media Multitasking While Learning” both of the articles discussed the different factors of media multitasking among individuals. The article from The Washington Post website gave great insight on multitasking and rather it is bad for students when it comes to learning. I believe that the issue being discussed is very relevant because if students are easily distracted by technology while in their learning environment it results in them not learning
Today we live in a society where everything is seconds away from us. With the advances and affordability of quality technology, you would be hard pressed to find someone without a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, possibly all at the same time. Because of the accessibility we find that, in our tech-savvy culture, multitasking has not just become an art form of sorts, but rather an expectation. In the article “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” Alina Tugend sets out to explore the idea that although multitasking appears to show productivity, it could be doing the opposite. Throughout her article, Tugend uses studies done by neurologists and psychologists to show how in a world that sees multitasking as an expectation it has actually made us less efficient. She proposes, through studies, that although you might be working on multiple tasks it is as if you’re playing tennis with multiple balls (Tugend, 725).
On May 3, 2013, The New York Times had posted an article discussing the poor effects that can happen to the brain if you are multitasking and being interrupted. There have been claims from numerous Universities suggesting that multitasking can deaden our brain. Sullivan and Thompson give us the insinuated results that if one wishes to accomplish two or more tasks at once, they will not reach the maximum capacity of success that the brain offers to them. Research on this topic has been minimal so the authors decide to investigate more on this epidemic (Sullivan and Thompson).
People live in a society that encourages getting as many things done as quickly as possible. Whether they realize it or not, multitasking as become a part of their everyday lives. They perform multiple tasks at the same time in order to save time. They use multiple electronics to take more in all at once. Multitasking can seem to be the more efficient way to handle things because people can spend the same amount of time on several tasks as opposed to just one. However, they do not stop to think of the amount of effort it takes the multitask and the consequences that can come along with it. Several experiments have been performed to determine just how detrimental multitasking can be. Attempting any form of multitasking
Another negative effect that mobile phones impair is mental focus while driving. People who are driving have their minds on the task in front of them with their full attention on the road. So when a person is conversing on a phone their attention is split as he or she is trying to multi-task both talking and driving at the same time. An article written by Nathan Seppa, the cause of “split attention”, he noted that David Strayer a psychology professor and his team studied to understand what impairs drivers when they talk on the phone. They conducted an experiment with drivers to see the effects of how varies distractions compare to each other. Strayer’s team accompanied drivers and assign them different distractive tasks while they maintain their eyes on the road in order to assess the effects. In the team’s findings they found that one most distracting tasks was talking on a mobile phone, which caused a driver’s performance to decline significantly. The typical tasks that drivers should perform on a regular basis, such as observing traffic changes, looking in rear-view mirrors, and watching for pedestrians was reduced overall (Seppa). Not many people can multi-task a conversation and driving at the same time without some drawbacks. Another drawback to a person focus was “unintentional blindness”, described by Simons, as “looking at something and not seeing it” (Seppa). So a person who is talking on a phone can end up not seeing an object whether it is a car, a stop sign or a pedestrian that is right in front of him and her. Many experiments were conducted by professionals to understand how “unintentional blindness” can affect a person’s perception, but one notable professional, Simmons, conducted a test of this concept:
It seems our society is still trying to obtain the ever so elusive principle of time. By multitasking we’ve have developed the perception that by performing two or more different tasks simultaneously that we can reduce the amount of time it takes to complete on single task; and once we’ve familiarized ourselves with a multitasking function we can achieve our ultimate goal, increasing our productivity. For instance the workplace overemphasizes multitasking to point that it’s a must needed job requirement on job applications (Otto). Multitasking is so important in our society that it becomes a necessity and often at times is inadvertently promoted in classrooms, tell-all books or celebrity biographies. You know the ones where someone famous talks about balancing work, parenting, school and successfully fulfilling their dreams. That misconception seems to have brought on the mentality of “if they can do it, I can do it too.” And in most cases we can’t because some pieces of the puzzle were missing in the tell all.
Research has proven that it is difficult to concentrate on driving and talking at the same time. A recent British study showed that talking on a mobile phone while driving was more hazardous than operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. Tests conducted by scientists for UK-based insurance firm, Direct Line, involved 20 subjects using a driving simulator to test reaction times and driving performance and compared this to when drivers had too much to drink. The results showed drivers' reaction times were, on average, 30 percent slower when talking on a handheld mobile phone than when legally drunk - and nearly 50 percent slower than under normal driving conditions. The tests also showed that drivers talking on phones were less able than drunk drivers to maintain a constant speed, and they had greater difficulty keeping a safe distance from the car in front.
Technology has always been improving over the decades, and now it has improved to the point where it’s a part of a human being’s life. People can’t imagine living without technology anymore nowadays, and especially college students who are always on their phones and laptops during lectures. That leads to what is known as multitasking, which is the ability to take care of more than one task at the same time. Multitasking has been popularized by students, and specifically college students, who think that they are actually successful at doing it. Unfortunately, according to Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, after testing students who think they are brilliant at multitasking, results showed that they are terrible at every aspect of multitasking; consequently, it is not successful.
The popular belief that multitasking is efficient, and the new-age generation is hard wired for multitasking, is highly misguided. Truth is, effective multitasking is an oxymoron. It’s not uncommon to see a person texting while walking down the street, listening to music while doing homework, or staring at a computer screen with multiple tabs and windows open. It’s hard not to multitask, given the amount of work people have to do and the non-stop information being thrown at them. People will do it as a force of habit; they think it will help them accomplish more tasks in a shorter time period. More often than not, they find it being the complete opposite. The brain can only process one activity at a time; instead, it switches gears, which takes time, reduces accuracy, distracts, and hinders creative thoughts. So, the real question should be: is multitasking actually worth the time? No, multitasking negatively affects people in all aspects of their life.
Technology has completely changed the culture of this world. We live in a world where our lives are constantly in motion because of portable devices. Different forms of technology have changed the way and the places that information is accessed. Fast entertainment is now the center of everyone's day. Mostly everything in our lives has something to do with entertainment. We are all seeking and craving entertainment all throughout the day just like fast food. Reading the article “Fast Entertainment and Multitasking in an Always-on World” by S. Craig Watkins, he share his views about multitasking with technology and the unlimited access to fast entertainment. People always feel the need to be connected and get their few minutes of media for the day, with technology being more accessible, more people are media consuming, and the youths are accessing the media more often and tend to access multiple things at once.