Free Do Smartphones Make US Dumber? Essay Example

This is the question of the century, do smartphones make us dumber? No, they don’t but they are definitely an inexhaustible source in distracting our attention, offering us a lot of possibilities for amusement such as multiple apps, a lot of engaging games and also with the Wi-Fi access the whole range of social media websites. Is not a problem of losing our focus is more like a choice of what we want to focus on, because with this amount of technological will determinate our desire to focus on insignificant things rendering us incapable on supporting attention in school or in other important things we need to do.
The people that are most targeted for this are now the young generation that almost had been born with smartphone in their hands, managing one since very little and beginning to be a part of their life in a short time. This is leading imperceptibly to an addiction of smartphones which reduce the ability of focusing in one single specific task due to the enormous possibilities that can be done on a smartphone. The amount of apps which can be juggled if something doesn’t seems so interesting, is infinite. To keep our attention on something we don’t need only the ability but also the desire to focus on that thing.
A teenager spends almost eleven hours of his daily routine, in front of a screen-based activity which requires fasts shifts of attention from playing games, to watching videos, to listening music, to different kind of app that requires different tasks or abilities. Most of the times, the task or being made simultaneous, bouncing the attention between two, three task or even more which leads as to the theory that the brain is pivoting from task to task not being able in time to sustain any more attention in one single point.
But far from losing our power of concentration and even not questioning that our focus is getting lower. The scientist discovered the best way on testing how much people can maintain focus by developing two relevant tests. The first one requires people strings of long numbers increasingly and the second test measure how visual stimuli are reacting on very subtle changes. The test showed that the result was much more the same as they were 50 years ago.
The development of technology doesn’t have only negative aspect. Due to the emergence of video games, some scientist discovered that playing it with action can improve a little aspects of vision. But this is only a small percentage of the positive aspect of technology related to attention. Teachers are complaining that almost 90% of students are paying attention in classes and this is not a physical problem as we established above is more a problem of unwilling and total uninterested for the subject discussed in class because the smartphones provides a better source of entertainment that in a classroom, students don’t feel it. Due to the small size of the smartphone and the easy access on it, a lot of people can afford it and can be transported everywhere. Most people use it almost all day.
Another negative aspect of the digital world is that provides an immediate, constant and limitless source of amusement it is clear that distract you from serious and boring things like school subjects are considered by many students. As an example, if it isn’t something funny on Spotify, YouTube is the next options and so on, and this is are only in a single phone incorporated and if something is funny it needs to be shared, so everyone in that class may have the video due to the social media networks and even the persons where interested about the class will be distracted.For teenagers, belonging to a group is very important and to be social accepted by others making you cool and boosting your self-esteem so. So for being part of a group, teenagers will get carried away, starting to behave like other teenagers that they sympathize, considering that a forward's behavior. If someone in class will play Candy Crush, the others one will start playing it in order to have a common subject of discussion or even to help each other to clear the levels. As stupid as it sound, for teenagers the social acceptance is sometimes more important than focus on school.
The ability of daydream is an inward system of attention which was also affected by the development of technology. The smartphones capture the outward system and these systems are working like a toggle switch, when one is on the other is off and backwards. Due to the focus on outward system, the inward system is fading, decreasing us the time we had to put in order our thoughts, to think about the past or to plan our day. Among others, this is associated with creativity, a capacity which is very important not be loose.
In conclusion, the smartphones aren’t eating our brains or making as dumb but the starting to separate us for the real world, which is a unique situation in human experience. The focus is a tool that we need to still learn to manage it properly by reflecting at our toughs and require inward attention to make our own judgments. Attention is the central ability to think and deteriorating it would require a big change of all our cognitive functions and this is a change that can happen only in time, being related to the mental evolution not because people are using more than ever smartphones.

Works cited:

Willingham, D.T. “Log In - The New York Times”. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 20 Jan. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/opinion/smartphones-dont-make-us-dumb.html?_r=0