While watching ‘Digital Nation’, a Frontline documentary on PBS[1], I found myself minimizing the screen and looking at iTunes and eBooks, or just opening up new tabs in my browser. I went to facebook, Google, and the sites for my other classes. I found myself getting lost in the Internet while I was listening to a documentary about how gaming, the Internet and different portable electronic devices are distracting and can cause long term memory and attention damage.
The documentary touched upon how digital natives are getting lost in the gaming world, spending more hours playing and social networking than at work. The Internet and the gaming world have an addictive quality that ends up distorting time for the user. Hours looking at friends on facebook, playing a new virtual reality game, browsing Google, or watching video’s on YouTube and Hulu feel like minutes.
When someone get’s the least bit bored, he/she has the opportunity to pause whatever they’re doing--whether it be homework, making funny photos with the built in camera, or playing a game. Computers and technology now have so much to offer that one can sit in the same chair for days and be completely immersed in the Internet and forget about other needs such as food or water.
The Internet has a sort of magical quality to it, where anything can happen. Whole worlds are created online, such as World of Warcraft. There are other games where people may create online selves either to mirror how they appear in real life or weave a completely different person that actually isn’t a person at all but an elf or vampire or werewolf. People can become whomever they want on the Internet, and converse with whomever they want.
Space and time just don’t have the same meaning anymore. What land barriers are there now that someone in Atlanta, Georgia can look at and converse with someone in Hong Kong, China instantly with the click of a button? How can time go by as slowly as hours when boredom is eliminated?
Nowadays, reading a book doesn’t take students hours to accomplish. They’ll simply go online and look at spark notes or just read certain fragmented passages or abridged versions in the form of PDF documents that will take minutes as opposed to days. And not only can students read online versions, but it is easier for them to read sections at a time of the abridged versions and move on to another task for a while than it is to put down a book and do the same thing. Fragmented versions allow for fragmented time and thought processes rather than one fluid amount of time and one linear thought process.
When one’s mind is flitting from one idea to another in the blink of an eye, the brain is taking in a plethora of more information, and maybe that’s why time seems to speed up. A new, different, ever-changing world should allow for a new, different and ever-changing measurement of time.
Your first paragraph adds to the argument nicely by using personal experience. It really caught my attention.
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