My name's Kelly. I like doing things that make me feel like a better person, and then telling stories about them later because I am shamelessly self-promotional. For example, one time I gave $10 in lottery tickets to the Sheetz employees for working on Christmas Eve. I don't have any emotional connection to the Sheetz employees (except when they get my MTOs wrong, then I'm just pissed off), but why the hell not. I have perfect pitch, which would be really cool (and potentially useful) if I still did anything with music... which I don't, really. I get bored with people really easily, but my conscience is too pronounced to just discard them, so I end up with 543 friends on Facebook about whom I give less than a shit. (Is that grammatically correct? Oh, well.)
I use lots of commas, and I really like Twitter. I've been on the computer at least since I was 1.5 years old, which is evidenced by a picture that's currently at my mom's house of my sister and I standing at our old Apple II back in 1992. (If I ever manage to gain access to a scanner, I'll put it up here.) As a "digital native", it would be unsurprising for me to uphold an indignant stance against anyone claiming that technology is forcing our brains to take a turn for the worse, as well as to defend the marvel of modern technological breakthroughs.
Well, that's just not the case. My mom and I have been having this conversation for years-- our lives today consist of GOGOGO, and never stop-and-smell-the-roses. To be 100% honest, I wish beyond reason that our dependence on technology was eliminated. People text in class at every opportunity they can seize. I have a limited view and even I can see it. It drives me nuts. In fact, I can barely emphasize that enough. I am sickened by contemporary society, especially in the younger generations. Would that I could time travel back to the 1970s and stop all of this. (Actually, I just wish that a T.A.R.D.I.S. existed IRL.)
Richtel says on page 44, "[Cell phones and computers] let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere." What's awesome is the complete deficiency in constructive output that we experience in a workplace nowadays. I only have a work study job through IUP where I work on students' computers, but it's evident even there how much people are dependent on their handheld devices. You can rest assured that the entire campus, especially at the administrative level, wouldn't last a day at "full functionality" (what that term even means anymore remains to be seen) without their Blackberrys, pagers (no lie, some people still use them), and just plain ol' cell phones.
(A side note: "plain ol' cell phones" is effectively a misnomer. Our dependence on technology is only fattened by "mandatory data plans" or whatever, as well as all this shit about 4G networks, and being able to access all the knowledge that has been accumulated and put in a virtual setting at all times. I still have a flip phone, a Samsung Smooth [one of the free ones], and damn it, it works for me.)
Texting-while-driving is enough to make me write an entirely different, lengthy, seething blog post. In Richtel's article, on page 43, he mentions the "dopamine squirt" that we get from receiving new messages (emails, texts, etc). I've heard about that before; we are literally, physiologically addicted to things like texting and checking our emails. It's like trying to quit smoking-- your doctor's all like, "You should do this!" and your body's like, "Fuck you!" It's possible, but if you don't have to quit, then why try? We're all going to die eventually, anyway, so why not read that text that your boyfriend sent you while you're going 75 mph down I-80? You've done it before-- it's not like anything bad is going to happen.
On another note, I feel like none of our experiences are sincere anymore. We learned in my Linguistic Anthropology class that we only receive about 10% of the intended message (context and all) when we read a text. You have no idea what that person is doing, or where they are when they're messaging you. On page 52, Richtel quotes Clifford Nass from Stanford University as saying, 'The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other.' We can't practice or feel empathy without having genuine conversations with people, and our ability (and care) to do that are just flying out the window-- with no one willing to stop it.
Since it takes a NY Times account to read this article and I really do have a harder time reading things from a screen than I do on paper, I didn't get the full experience of clicking on the interactive links. I'm not sure where I would have fallen in the experiment conducted by Mr. Ophir at Stanford. On the one hand, I feel like I can multitask well if the tasks are trivial. However, if I'm being asked to really give a good amount of concentration to anything, it has to be one thing at a time. On page 47, I'm glad that he mentions that "multitaskers [tend] to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work". I personally think it's necessary to learn from our mistakes and take the information that is available to us. Not only is it easier to string your thoughts together when you have a base, but it's almost insulting to the pioneers who came before you to ignore their hard work in favor of looking for whatever Google gives you first.
Ultimately, I think the results of the tests mentioned in Richtel's article are unsurprising. For example, on page 48: "A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles." I think some of the best papers that I've written have been when I've done most everything I can to unplug-- I disable my wireless connection (since I don't have an Ethernet cable in this apartment), shut off my cell phone, throw on some Explosions in the Sky (they're wordless and, if quiet enough, can drive me to a great state of composition through emotion). Once I finish the paper, I usually transition to reading a book or something, since the unplugging process has already begun. Hopefully I never get to the point where that isn't possible, because I just don't know what I would do.
