Blog 2 - Digital Nation: Unflattening our Discourses on Technology

     In Nass' documentary on multitasking, or rather, the illusion of multitasking, he argued that, while an increasing number of people, especially in the college demographic, believe themselves to be quite adept at the art of multitasking, that is, focusing on many different things at once, an idea brought on by our increasingly digital era, where every student has a phone, ipod, computer, etc running at the same time, these people are often not as skilled as they might like, and in fact, this multitasking society that we have created may slowly be killing our ability to think critically and work efficiently.

     Personally, I think this viewpoint is a little reactionary. Certainly the science behind what Nass was arguing is valid. A person is always going to be at their most efficient when they are focusing on one thing and one thing alone. However, this method of doing things doesn't work in the real world anymore.

      In a lot of ways, technology, and the ability it gives us to do multiple things at once, is a huge benefit to society. Take this picture above. The person here has facebook on their computer and twitter on their phone. Nass would probably argue that this kind of thing only limits our ability to do either task efficiently, but I personally disagree. I think it depends on what is meant by "efficiency." If you're on facebook on your laptop, and you want to tweet something, you'd have to open a new tab (or new window if you're stuck in the 90's), log into twitter, tweet whatever it is, and then migrate back to facebook and resume whatever you were doing there. Sure that whole exchange probably takes like 25 seconds, but still. If you have these apps on your phone, you can leave facebook up on your computer, pull up twitter on your phone, keep looking at facebook while it loads, jot down your tweet, and then resume what your were doing on your laptop, never really losing focus on either thing.

     This idea relates a lot to the idea of what Nass described as "entertaining ourselves to death." His standpoint was that we're so wired and constantly looking at so many different things: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, Email, Texts, etc, that we can't possibly focus on the important matters in life. Moving into the theory of "Always On," I think this idea, that people today are always on some kind of networked device, is the core to debunking the idea of entertaining ourselves to death. If someone from, say, the 19th Century, whose only forms of information were books, and whose only forms of communication were literally talking to someone or sending a letter, were suddenly thrust into our society and given a cell phone, this idea of being entertained to death would be valid. The poor guy would be overwhelmed with the novelty and efficiency of this new power, and would likely lose sight of real life.

What am I supposed to DO with this thing?

     However, people today are born into this kind of always on world, and are exposed to the veritable smorgasbord of technology that surrounds us from day one. As such, while it certainly does affect our ability to do certain things, the constant use of technology we have is far from debilitating to the point of killing us.