The Effect of Technology on a Person's Attention Span

"Mom, I need to go I'm driving. Just text me what you need to say, it's faster." And those were the last words this mother heard from her daughter before she was in a fatal car accusent. The luxuries that this modern-day society had developed is great in some aspects, but the underlying truth of the matter is that the fast paced nature of technology is handicapping some to the extent that they cannot even hold a decent conversation. In the novel, "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradybury, the poem, "The Sound of Silence" by Paul Simon, and also the article, "Social Websites Hirt Children's Brains: Chilling Warning to Parents From Top Neuroscientist," technology is symbolically used to show that it effects the attention span, the ability to think rationally, and how the minds of the user are getting rewired to as if we were little children again.

In Ray Bradbury's novel, "Fahrenheit 451," Guy Montag becomes infatuated with the idea of thinking after a peculiar neighbor girl shows him the problems with this futuristic distopia's society. "'I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,' she said. 'If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?'"(Bradbury 8). Clarissa had just opened up The mind of an ignorant fireman on the obvious fact that their society they lived in was messed up, because they are so consumed with doing every as fast as possible. This parallels to present-day technology, because everybody is so accustomed to doing things su...

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... of meat on the supermarket shelf." One can easily see how our society is becoming bicameral, in the sense of the man or woman themselves, but also their technology that connects them to so much.

As people can probably see this today, technology is not only harming our attention spans, ability to efficiently complete tasks, and think and communicate, but also harms our abilities to communicate with one another. Although cell phones, tablets, and computers were made to supplement the user's life, they actually do more harm than good for our society, because of our ignorance to the harmfulness of it all. People can argue all they want about the good and bad sides of technology but the fact of the matter is change is needed, and our future generations can take a lot from what the Dalai Lama once said, "Real change in society must start from individual initiative."