The Role of Technology in Our Lives and Its Negative Effects

Though technology has played a tremendous role in improving our lives, it also has it’s faults. The more and more technology becomes the more it will negatively impact us, for example causing addiction. Technology doesn’t only cause addiction, but it causes students to have a drop in focus, and it also causes students to do negatively in school. A regular use of technology can cause a drop in focus. In the article Students Can’t Resist Distractions for More Than Two Minutes….

And Neither Can You, scientists did a test where they followed 263 students into places where they normally studied and told them to work on an important school assignment for 15 minutes. “…some students, even when on their best behavior, can’t concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.” This quote shows that students tend to lose focus due to the everyday technology that surrounds them.

Rather than focusing on what is important, they’re focusing on entertaining themselves using the internet.

In addition scientist are beginning to think about recreating the famous marshmallow test, a test that shows children who can delay eating one marshmallow for 10 or 15 minutes are more likely to succeed later in life, but instead of using marshmallows they might see how long one person can resist “a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.” Experts say that it’s not the contents of the phone which makes it hard to stay away from, but it’s rather the mind of the user.

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Those who can resist the appeal of the technology are more likely to succeed. Naturally in another research, done by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction lab asked 136 college students to take a “standard test of cognitive abilities”, while the researchers used a controlled method of distractions. Students that were taking the test were interrupted over instant message, which supposedly contained important additional instructions during the test (Students can’t resist distractions for more than two minutes… neither can you). As explained earlier, this also has something to do with multitasking.

Toggling between one subject to another could cause one to lose focus and letting their work suffer for it. In the same article, expert Annie Murphy Paul warns, “Multitasking while doing academic work – which is very common among young people – leads to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning.” When Paul refers to multitasking she refers to students playing on cell phones, listening to music, and checking updates on social media. This takes the student’s attention away from the academic studies which makes it easier to forget what they have learned. Since the brain is constantly switching from one subject to another it takes the brain some time to process what is going on. These are the reasons of why technology causes students to have a drop in focus and why they do negatively in school.