Good Example Of Essay On Dumber Natives

This is common perception among digital natives that technology has made our lives easier and smarter. Supporters of technology claim that people now can access any information from any part of the world by using their laptop, internet and Google. However, various experts claim that technology reduced our ability of critical thinking, reading, analysing and arguing. People’s reliance on technology is continuously increasing and making them less active as compared to earlier generations when influence of technology in human life was very less. This paper proposes a discussion how technology impacts digital natives and making them dumber.
Supporters of modern digital communication technology say that technology provides us opportunity to access multiple knowledge fields and enable us to communicate with variety of people across the world. However, at the same time, technology programmed our brain in a manner that it does not want to read much (Carr). In my personal opinion, people now are not required to read long articles and books in order to get any information. People prefer using technology to get summary of articles and all important points on the Google. During earlier times people were required to visit libraries, and talk to experts in order to get information, which use to increase their research abilities.
I believe that technology has weakened our creativity because now people do not read much and grasp only desired information. People can visit different websites without much effort, and this easy access of information does not help them. Such things put human brain on rest and make people dumber. Continuous updates, messages or notifications from other communication mediums such as Facebook, Twitter and e-mails divert our attention. Excessive digital media keeps on diverting our attention from one piece of information to another piece.
Excessive digital media does not allow digital natives to spend long hours or enough time on specific article or information, which is essential for deep thinking and thought process. Gary, Director of UCLA says that modern digital technology is controlling people and adversely impacting their lives and personal relationships. Gary mentions that digital natives are required to use technology in controlled and efficient manner so that it increases their creativity and enhance social connectivity (Gordon).
Small and Vorgan (2008) in their book “iBrain” describe the term “continuous partial attention”. The authors said that digital natives are trying to keep a tab on multiple things without seriously focusing on even a single thing. In other words people are sacrificing with the depth of any subject, information or issue in order to increase the width. Social networking websites, texting, YouTube and other media produced crowd of distracted digital natives, who are multi-taskers (Small and Vorgan).
Research studies conducted to analyze the efficiency and outcomes of processes performed under single-task condition and multi-tasks condition show that people produce higher results when allocated single task as compare to multiple tasks. Hence, it can be said that young people or digital natives are performing multiple tasks with less efficiency and poor results. In my personal opinion also digital natives may be capable of performing multiple tasks by utilizing technology but they are unable to focus on any task, which results in decreasing their efficiency.
In my personal opinion, excessive digital technology not only impacts performance of the people but also impacts other areas such as communication, relationships, and reading & writing skills. The thinking and learning process of human being is not completely occurred in human brain; it also occurred in extended mind. Human thinking process gets significantly impacted by variety of resources present in external environment such as social dynamics and transitive memory. Therefore, physical interaction and face to face conversation provides great learning as compare to communication took place over e-mail or Facebook.
People utilized computers and laptops for their study purpose. They prepare their assignments on computers, which has auto-correction of spell and grammar. In my personal opinion, this practice is adversely impacting writing skills of young people as they make spelling mistakes while writing with pen and papers. Digital natives also spend majority of their time in reading unedited net-speak that reduce the opportunity to learn edited English.
I observed that modern technology and communication mediums also confuse people. Internet users get confusing information at different websites. They may get information about same thing in different forms at different websites. There are a number of websites that do not provide very authentic information. Wikipedia is one of websites that provide unverified information to its users. A majority of its users fail to understand that this information may not be authentic. They do not care to apply their own mind and in such a situation, their act makes them only dumber.
After considering various aspects of the issue and analysing its various aspects, the paper concludes that technology has certainly decreased the productivity of human brain and has made users dumber. Relying on technology has changed our reading habits and people opt the easier way of getting information which is internet and communication technology. People, who rely on technology excessively without using their brain, may decrease the efficiency of their brain.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" 1 July 2008. The Atlantic. 30 March 2015 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>.
Gordon, Dan. "Think Again." 1 April 2013. UCLA Magazine. 30 March 2015 <http://magazine.ucla.edu/features/think-again/>.
Small, Gigi and Vorgan, Gigi. iBrain. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2008.