Researchers worry developing brains are being twisted by too much texting. Teens say they can do more things at a time than we give them credit for. What do you think?
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comDo you think technology is damaging kids' brains by robbing them of their ability to sustain attention?
Seeded on Sun Nov 21, 2010 1:26 PM EST (msnbc.com)
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Yes, without a doubt. I see it everyday in the classroom and it is increasing. I have been teaching for...SQUIRREL!!!
No....what was the question??
It's already too late my friend.
I've spent most of my life around technology, and I make a good income running a software development business. There is a huge demand for people who can utilize technology well, especially those who can market through social networking sites like Facebook.
Exactly ! Great Post !
Progress is progress...
... but it's always funny how technology is supposed to "simplify" our lives. In ways it does...
Well... I guess the upshot is that when society collapses people can just look up what they need to know about survival on wiki. lol.
I don't believe it to be the gadgets that are the problem/issue here. It has become a matter of obsessive compulsion when it comes to Cell Phones, video games and Internet sites. These kids have actually allowed the real world to slip away and they are living in a sterile, fake world of the Internet.
Most hit dead ends socially from their lack of social interaction with REAL people when they are old enough to go out and be around people. We have seen an huge upswing of rude, overbearing 20 somethings and its a direct result of having no clue how to live around and with real people while having to communicate face to face and not being Superman, or Captain Cool on an Internet site.
We started being understanding and patient, allowing all of these pseudo learning disorders to excuse kids from the responsibility to their own education and placed it squarely on the shoulders of the teachers where it does not belong. Schools need to hold kids accountable, instead of catering to Guilt ridden absentee parents. and allowing kids to slide past the system. Schools MUST stick to their guns RIGIDLY, the only way a kid should pass a grade is on the merit of his/her grades. Not on some Pseudo learning disorder excuse or some parent convinced that the color of their kids skin has something to do with their actions in school and how they are treated... When kids get it through their very ignorant skulls that they will not be moving on with their peers unless they pass these classes (Like it was when I went to school) they.. like us, will place the effort into getting it done. But parents and Teachers have allowed excuses to weasel their way in... and failure has been the result. The worst phrase we ever allowed to take hold in our educational system is "Learning Disorder"... Unless a child is basically retarded, the only "Learning Disorder" they have is their own lazy butt. If it were something they though they wanted or thought important they would place the effort they place into beating a damn game into their school work. I have seen ADD, ADDHD... and every other excuse cause kids to end up stoned on Med's their whole childhood life and unable to deal with life as an adult because of it.
Don't blame the toy's.... Blame the people who play with them way too much! And blame those who allow it to happen.
Technology has its place as an extension of ourselves but it must be limited or you'll get lost in it. These kinds aren't learning / studying while their online their posting on facebook / watching videos their friend made or playing video games for hours each day. All while their grades are slipping and their ability to focus degrades. Doing fun / cool stuff is something you do on free time not before. I grew up around the internet / PSX and my parents enforced the iron rule that if my grades slip they were going to physically remove that stuff from my room and lock it away until my grades improved. They did this several times and this is how I learned to prioritize work over play. What this kids don't get is that life is full of things you don't want to do but have to anyway. What will these kids do when their future boss asks them to do a project / paper / study that their not interested in? Ignore it while working on what they want to work on?
And no where is this more visible then the comparison of the two different teachers. One was the "free thinking" "rad" "cool" teacher who was teaching a class on media editing, something that while being a good skill to have doesn't lead to a very financially rewarding career path. While the other was the Latin teacher, Latin while being a dead language is heavily used in all things legal / medical / scientific / mathematical / engineering. Being able to read (not speak) latin goes a long way in dealing with the technical terminology that goes with those fields. I wonder how many of those kids will graduate to become engineers / doctors / scientists?
And all this goes back to parents, the root of all this. In the fight between immediate gratification vs increased future value, immediate gratification wins almost every time. We have an entire gambling industry based on the singular fact that humans will rather take a smaller reward now vs a bigger reward later. And their giving this choice to young children and wondering why they skip on homework / study for the immediate gratification. Parents need to confiscate all those electronic devices. No PC / Cellphone / Gaming system access after a certain time at night. No access to those things before homework is finished. Parents asking to see what the kid is learning in skill, every single day making the kid show their homework. These are things my parents did to me (I graduated HS 1999) and it made me study and taught me to plan for my future. Now I hold a systems engineering job with a major global corporation where I interact with and design the very systems people "work with" every day. I have my parents to thank for teaching me the mental discipline and forcing me to lean to do things I didn't want to do.
Do not hold teachers responsible for your responsibilities.
If kids do not know when to put their electronic distractions down and pick up a book or hold a conversation with a real person, then the blame lies directly on the parents.
If students don't learn to put distractions aside and concentrate in school, they're in for a very rude awakening when they enter the job market. Parents and teachers might tolerate someone with the attention span of a gnat, but an employer will simply replace them with someone who can actually get some work done.
Unfortunately, nowadays, school systems won't allow the teachers to actually FAIL a student. God forbid! They give them to the absolute millisecond before the year's over to turn in homework or project that were due months ago. Then, when the kids hit college and professors that don't give a flip and give a big fat ZERO to work NOT turned in on time, they don't know what to do. Even worse - GASP! - an employer demands you be ON TIME for work or projects!
It's beyond time that these kids FAIL. Until they do, they refuse to grasp reality that you HAVE to get the work done ON TIME, regardless of compters or IPods, or whatever.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree. I am a very avid technology user. I have been using computers since they were introduced in my Kindergarten class. (Though, of course the IBM computers with a handful of DOS games aimed at educational purposes is regressing quite a bit from what it has evolved into thus.) My interest in computers has grown phenomenally since, and I spend quite a considerable amount of time on the computer.
However, this has not hindered my work ethic what so ever. It may because I was never very intrigued with the idea of cellular phones, I rarely use one even now. And while this has not affected my work ethic, it seems to be the only thing of importance for most of my co-workers. I am under the impression that I am quite possibly one of the most efficient workers in the area I am employed. This is not meant to be a smug remark, but one that I have compiled after viewing that none of my co-workers have been able to keep up with the pace that I have set, yet none of them have been fired, or given warnings, and some are paid a considerable amount higher than I am.
In today's society I do believe that even employers are being more lenient with people's infatuation with technology due to the decreasing amount of people who actually wish to work. (More than likely due to the fact that people who want to work get the same benefits as people who don't want to.)
Another example of the destruction of core family values upon which this country was built. Unless we return to the basics of common human decency will we be forever doomed.
Not entirely true. The destruction of core family values has occurred more so due to excessive drug usage, Generation X's general apathy for their children. Because children have been forgotten, they are now turning towards outlets that embrace them. I'd have to say technology is allowing these people to form families they never had. Also, "common human decency" is something that is forgotten quite often. Though it has not been the same situation per-say, humankind has already traveled this path a plethora of times.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article.....case in point, I am currently sitting in my college's library, commenting on this article instead of doing my engineering homework :-/. And my parents tried very hard to limit screen time when my siblings and I were younger. Every generation after mine is screwed if they are asked to do anything without technology. I also don't think using technology in schools is a viable "solution" because by the time students get to college (especially if they are in a math/science intensive major like engineering) they have to be able to do a lot of the work by hand. And when we have assignments that are on computer, I understand the material even less than when I do it by hand.....and I'm the one that's going to design your bridges. Time to go waste some more time on facebook...
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story (The Weapon too Dreadful to Use[?]) in which the opposing forces were so dependent on calculators that no one knew or cared how to do math by hand. A guy on one side, who was considered kind of a useless idiot savant, an object of ridicule, was able to win battles with paper and pencil when his side discovered how to knock out all the calculators, including their own. Now you have something else to waste time on ;-D
If this kid thinks that all he needs to do is work on his own film reguardless of everything around him then hes going to be in for a very rude awaking.
Employment life is getting very hard for everyone and people with the right skills are a dime a dozen, this kid is lost. Sheeps to the slaughter...
Yes, and we will be the ones paying the taxes that support his kind !
It's called the stupidity of youth - you know everything at 16, your parents don't know squat and are totally stupid. Then at 25, you suddenly realize how STUPID YOU were and how smart they were/are.
The job market, though increasingly diminishing, has already begun to adjust to technology junkies. It's not as if though great strides haven't already been made in order to compensate a groups faults. This will be just another thing that employers will soon adjust to. Why? Because they'll have no choice.
I don't know about damaging but sometimes I feel like slapping them around a bit.
The other day as I was waiting for the bus to go this young lady pulls up in her beat-up car, phone still in-ear, no hand-free as mandated by law, she come into the bus, still talking. When we left the bus, her phone was still glued to her, no let up for even 1 second to see where she was stepping etc. I felt like telling her, "Say I know somebody who can surgically implant a phone in your brain!"
This dinosaur from the grade schools beginning in 1927 can only agree completely with the view expressed in this article.
Yes, I think the internet is a problem. I'm 67 and I, myself, am having the same problems that Vishal is having. The internet is too distracting. It just has too much to offer. I'm going to try to give my grandkids gifts for Christmas and birthdays that have absolutely nothing to do with electronics.
As an educator and retired technical writer this writer has found a "chronic short attention span dilemma" in students today.
Having spent twenty-five years in business and industry, few problems encountered as job related can be solved in short periods of time. Some last months and even years. With no switching off to the next app.
With a degraded attention spans, workers will find it more and more difficult to "stick with" long-ranged projects and will no doubt bail out of the project and possibly the job that created it.
Today's kids are growing up to be organic morons and won't be functional if you take away their cell phone.
I'm only 22, but I don't sit around and jerk around on Twitter and Facebook all day (I don't even have accounts). I read the news, and comment once in a while when I have time (like now, on an idle Sunday afternoon). Here's an idea, tell them to get off their lazy asses, and get outside, get some fresh air, and clean up around the house to get em on their toes, and quit wanking around with useless crap like their cell phone.
Good advice, MS - I'm a high school teacher, would love to have you in as a guest speaker!
Great idea. And after that fails, then what?
The answer is simple, stop paying the cell phone bills ! If they are working to earn money to pay the bills they will see what a waste of time it is and if nothing else, appreciate it more.
Bingo! we have a winner.
And this has become the #1 problem today. Parents are afraid to instill discipline in their kids. They treat them like special butterfly's until they get into their teens, then the kid doesn't obey mom / dad.
Seriously don't pay for any more of their toys. Institute a policy that they must make above a certain grade to have daytime access to their toys and if they slip below that grade you take away and lock up their toys. Why do parents buy those stupid cell phones for their kids then complain when their on it all the time? Buy them a computer for their room and complain why their on it all the time? It would seem that logic and reason say to restrict access to these things.
 The kids that believe they can multi-task like the examples in the article are going to find they are almost unemployable.
Well paying jobs require more than basic math and English skills.
Try getting a job with "have mad computer skilz and texting skilz" as your only listing under "Skills"
Yep. Highly multi-task = can't focus.
What amuses me about this whole issue is that I'm practically unemployable because I CAN'T multi-task! I have to be focused on one thing and one thing only. Trying to get me to do five different projects at once is a recipe for failure. My brain just isn't wired that way. But no employer will hire me because I can't do three peoples' jobs at once. I tried for years and simply can't do it, and it got me fired and has kept me out of the job market.
*has attention span - will work (but just on one thing at a time!)*
I recently worked with a young project manager who Facebooks and Twitters and has the attention span of a gnat. His overriding goal was to make things as complicated (bleeding edge) as possible. Our client was pissed that we ran way over budget.
A sign of things to come.
What drives me nuts is getting email from someone that makes use of "text speak". Months ago I had a very young engineer in my office interviewing, that verbally communicated using the same methods.
Until they are in positions of authority 15-20 years from now, they are just going to have to speak and write properly to communicate with us older folk. It is unprofessional, and I won't tolerate it from my subordinates.
I think alot of this ends up in the parents corner: I made the mistake of giving the oldest a computer too soon but then laid down the law with the next 2: made them all buy their own cell phones and pay their plans.
Parents enable kids to do this because they pay for it, and we tend to confuse technology with goof off stuff: sorry, Facebook is not technology; it uses technology but it is not technology so knowing how to use it gives you nothing.
This generation basically does not how to deal with people because they dont want to. They can be loud mouth on Facebook because there is no responsibility so they say what ever they want: when they are around people, they don't know what to say because they don't know what the rules are and they know that, so they don't say anything and cannot engage in normal human relations.
We have allowed them to misuse the language: if everything is "awesome", how can you really explain when something is average, below average, or on that rare occasion, really "awesome".
In the end, the use of texting is a worldwide happening but it is US kids who fail to be able to coop....our school scores continue to decline and the interest in basic and needed paths of learning in math, science etc also continues to decline, I think because it requires effort and concentration. If we truly care for our kids, we have to start to tell them "NO", you have to study, I will have your cell phone till you home work is done, you can't have internet connection until your homework is done, and the the computer being used will be in living room: taking back our parental responsibilities instead of letting immature teenagers determine what they are going to do.
If Vishal and others only realized that the computer and other devices are REAL tools, they would go far. However, it's like a child using a father's socket-ratchet as a noise making toy. These devices have given me a good living. Yes, games and messaging are part of the digital revolution. But, communication and production are also the main advantage of these "toys". Education, by digital means, is the near and far future. Of course, kids are easily distracted and have short attention spans, but show them how these tools can make them money and they excel.
Yep, the kids are tuned out of the surroundings the real world around them. Every time I walk across campus, I constantly have to dodge the zombie kids who are not watching where they are walking because they are busy texting. While standing in line, it is common to see a young person texting away while ignoring her family. The irony is that when these people are face to face with the people they have been texting, they ignore them because they are busy texting other people.
One more thing. These devices are making it almost impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation with anyone. I can be talking to someone and every time they get a text, it diverts their attention from our conversation. It's like there is a 3rd person who I can't see that is constantly butting into the conversation. It's rude.
Okay, we already know that their are always several angles that we can skin the steak, potato, and tomato. One major thing to consider has been what has been promoted...
I am an advocate for technology. Evidence of this is that I am commenting right now in this medium. I also support educators. But I don't support parents very much... I think they are overwhelmed right now trying to pay their bills and their parental responsibilities are back-burnered.
Something to think about is this... How much money is spent on marketing to talk about the next big thing? How much money is spent on 'education' to talk about the next big thing?
We encourage companies to spend so much more on marketing (supply/demand theory) because the results are more noticable. We would benefit more from spending more on education/parenting to help generations understand how to 'efficiently' benefit from the technological toys. iPhone, iPad, GameBoy DS, Wii, Droid, Android, smartphone, cellphone, internet, and computer... all of these have edcational, entertainment, and productive value.
Society is still trying to figure out the right blend....
Many classrooms in our school system now include a "cell phone basket". Kids walk in, turn off the cells and put them in the basket. They don't complain about it, in fact, they seem relieved to be able to focus on the class. At the end of class, they retrieve their phone (and then use sanitizer so they don't spread phone germs). Technology is great, witness this article and newsvine community, but there is a time and place for everything.
A lot of parents don't realize there are options to control their kids while online or texting. There are computer programs (even free ones) and devices that will turn the internet off whenever you set it to do so, or even track what your kid is doing. You can always take the pone away at night and I do believe there are plan options with some phone companies that turn off the phone at preplanned times.
I laugh now, because in the 1980's, many adults thought the 4 minute music video's effect on the attention span of my generation was going to be the downfall of society. Now, a 4 minute music video would be an ETERNITY for todays teenager to try and watch all the way through. I shake my head every time I see a crowd of these people together, because without fail they aren't interacting with each other, they are staring at their "mobile device" and texting (probably to the person standing right next to them). We already see some of the effect of the 70's and 80's generation coming into power in government,business, etc... I can't (really I can) wait to see in the not so distant future when these slaves to their phones are running the show. One word: Idiocracy
This irks me to no end, if you're out in a social situation talk to the people there instead of someone miles away. Sometimes I've been tempted to smack the damn things out of their hands.
Will these easily distracted little sheeple be lead to their slaughter? Most definately so. This is America's sad future. The fortitude of preserving freedom given away by the facebooks.
Technology can be destructive to a young person's ability to react in normal social experiences. The ability to interact and establish relationships is often hampered by the need for rapid information. Reading no longer is the joy to many young people and the skill of writing is rarely used, i.e., writing thank you notes, creating poetry, learning about another person by means of writing and reading letters. The addiction of technology can diminish family relationships and friendships. I believe this problem needs to be controlled by teachers and parents as any good thing can be overused and become a detriment.
These students become the adults with the cellphones, texting, etc. There is nothing more annoying than trying to talk to an adult who is checking his/her iphone every two seconds. It is rude, desrespectful, and when you see them doing it in a car, it is extremely dangerous. I am talking about adults here. It's like they don't look cool and with it unless they are doing all of these things. Adults grow up!!! We did alright without all this stuff when we were young. Your kids see you do it and they grow up doing it too. Hello....alot of young people can't even write with a pen or pencil anymore. I like technology. I use it. I do not abuse it. The world should not revolve around the blackberry, computer, or iphone or ipad. When you are with another person who is not using these items but is talking to you then you turn off your device and put it away!!!!
As a teacher in public schools for twenty-five years, I say a hearty amen to this article. A friend of mine who teaches chemistry, was tutoring a student after school. Nothing she did seemed to make any sense to the young man, and time went on without result. Finally, his cell phone rang, and he asked permission to answer it. After a brief conversation, she reprimanded him, and told him to turn it off. It was as if a light had suddenly come on. Suddenly, they were making fantastic progress! Just the idea that a message might be forthcoming had the student so distracted that he could not focus. I see this all the time in class. Not only are they texting when they should be listening, but they have the phones on when they should be concentrating on homework. They never seem able to learn anything on their own, and we remediate remedial work constantly, because they are convinced that they have all the knowledge they need at their fingertips.
Parents not only seem unable to control their child's behavior, they cannot even control their own urges to call or text their child during school hours even though cell phones are forbidden at school. For crying out loud, how did we all ever grow up without our parents being able to contact us every hour of the day or night?????
As a mormon, I say send them on a mission. No technology for two years and nothing but Jesus Christ xD!
Well said, Nancy W! Parents and educators, don't blame technology, and for that matter, don't trash multi-tasking. It is up to the adults to institute some structure/discipline, by reducing or eliminating distractions when the child is working. Turn off the TV, turn off the cell phone, and turn off the computer unless it is an integral part of the work. When adults abdicate their responsibility to guide and nurture their young, when they rely on technology for "babysitting" alternatives, how can we lament the lack of focus and attention on the part of the next generation.
'"I prefer the immediate gratification"
I think this says it all. Glad I won't be around in 30 years to see the results.
Says it all ! It is electronic CRACK !