Unit 1 Portfolio
This
genre of this source is an article released through the medium of PRI.org,
which is a non-profit media outlet,
“focused on the intersection of journalism and engagement to effect
positive change in people’s lives.” PRI is largely funded by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation. Their foundation is dedicated to bettering lives in
the world through seemingly every possible way. This type of article is written
through the viewpoint of
non-profit media company with underlying goals of
helping people, equality, tackling poverty among other initiatives. It makes sense that this article is relatively
short and concise because the desired audience ranges are far and wide, from
youth, to those with low literacy rates, to educators and everyone in between. In
this article, which I believe the author’s project and intentions were aligned
with the goals of PRI and the Gates Foundation, is to effect lives positively
through the sharing of impactful information. As Bill Gates said, “Power comes
not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared.” This source undoubtedly
fits into the overall conversation and engages in the same conversation
regarding the detriments of technology. This source focused on physical
detriments to the mind, rather than the mental state, which was discussed in
the other two sources.
The author T.J. Raphael effectively analyzed paper reading versus
e-reading, using insights of top researchers. They successfully concluded that digital
reading is processed differently than paper reading. When humans read on
screens, neuroscience research has revealed that the mind shifts towards a
practice called “non-linear” reading. “Non-linear,” involves tendencies to skim
read and having your eyes “dart around,” amidst the plethora of distractions on web pages. This “non-linear,” inattentive and easily distracted skim reading, is
what they call a “bi-literate brain.” When someone engages in digital reading, they
tend to not use the deep reading part of your brain, and when you don’t use it,
you lose it! Manoush Zoromodi, managing editor and host of WNYC’s New Tech City
stated that, “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep
reading, and on the internet, we don’t
do that.” Furthermore, Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and
Language Research at Tufts University is worried that we, “…will not use our
most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re given too much
stimulation.” To keep the deep reading part of your brain alive, Wolf, among
other researcher’s agree that it is important to put time aside each and
everyday to read on paper.
As a millennial still in the developmental stages of my brain, I
found this to be extremely helpful and relevant. I will now set aside time
every single day to read “paper,” and develop my deep reading processes. This “bi-literate
brain,” which stems from the skim-reading on screens and distracted web reading
could be even more problematic for the elementary and middle school youth that
are inseparable from technology, and are barely being exposed to paper reading in school. Will these students ever develop deep reading
processes? It makes me wonder, what are the missed opportunities of the future
due to generations without developed deep reading processes? While the
portrayal of the information was successful, the dispersion and outreach of
this powerful information to the rest of the world was not successful. What I, along
with many others consider critical information for the development of youth,
why hasn't the Gates Foundation’s billions of dollars been put towards sharing
this information on the national and international media stages? Perhaps, they should put this
information on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. If, power comes from knowledge
shared, why aren’t they putting more effort into sharing this information? This
may be a bit of an exaggerated analogy but, not sharing this critical
information for the development of the world’s youth, is as useful as placing
the brightest scientists with endless resources in a lab to cure diseases on
the moon, with no way of communicating the information back to earth.
This Ted Talk by Adam Alter, a Psychology
and Business Professor, successfully displays why technology/screens makes us
less happy, but professor Alter does not disregard and discount the miraculous
capabilities of technology. When Professor Alter recognizes and alludes to the undeniable
positives of screens, it greatly increases his credibility from the viewers
perspective. Through a portion of this Ted Talk, he details how top Silicon
Valley executives limit their kids screen time. Although, 75% of the students
at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Silicon Valley are made up of Silicon
Valley executives’ children, it doesn’t introduce screens until the 8th grade.
Silicon Valley executives who eat, sleep and breathe screens, send their kids
to schools that remove them from screens until age 13. A New York Times
reporter asked Steve Jobs, “Your kid’s must love the iPad?” Steve Job’s
response was, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use
at home.” Alter found that people spend
3 times as much time on applications that don’t make them happy, rather than
the ones that make them happy. The dating, browsing, social networking and
gaming applications that people spend the most time on actually make people
unhappy and upset. People spend so much time on these applications because developers
of these applications have removed stopping cues. With a book, you finish a
chapter; with a television show, the episode ends, but on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, Tinder and many other applications, they have removed all stopping
cues so you can scroll forever. Some applications have even removed the clock
in the top write corner of your screen.
According to Alter, companies and people
who have put in measures to limit screen use have had extremely strong
responses. They say that their “life becomes more
colorful, richer, more
interesting -- you have better conversations.” The author’s project I
believe is to teach people of the usually ignored detriments of screen use and
open the publics eyes to the possibilities and happiness that can be achieved
if you just put your phone in airplane mode and take a breath. But, he does not
only detail the problems and negative effects, he also provides solutions. Do
not choose a time such as 5-6PM every day to turn off your phone, because 5-6PM looks different every day, but to schedule it around daily events. We eat every
single day, put your phone away at set meal. At first, you
may suffer from severe “FOMO”, but once you fight that temptation you will eventually
expand that break from your screens. The project presented as a speech and
presentation was both extremely effective and provided additional positive
elements that could only be elicited through a video presentation. Through the video
presentation genre, the speaker was able to provide visuals to set the scene,
tonal cues and use hand motions to effectively share his thoughts and
information. Often times in written articles, podcasts and other mediums, there are often
misrepresentations or misconstrued elements because you cannot hear tonal cues
or see visual cues. Additionally, through TED talks which are recorded videos that are then
uploaded to the website, it has a far greater outreach and targets the
technologically progressive and dependent world that we live in. The author was
immensely successful, as he clearly, credibly and concisely shared his viewpoint,
which was backed up by research and academic findings. Furthermore, this
presentation perfectly fits into the dialogue of my portfolio, as I look to
explore the impact of technology and screens with solutions to counteract them.
This scientific study aimed to discover correlations between Problematic Internet
Use (PIU) or excessive Internet use and social anxiety, which are characterized
by the study as “excessive or poorly controlled preoccupations, urges, or
behaviors regarding computer use, and Internet access that leads to impairment
or distress.” The results showed that there was no existing gender bias in the
results on levels of Internet addiction, nor did they find that a specific
social networking platform yielded higher levels of social anxieties. The
study’s results reaffirmed previous evidence of the “cooccurrence of Internet
addiction and social anxiety.”
The author’s project was to either affirm
or reject previous studies that linked social anxiety and PIU. The study
included 240 students, the mean age for women was 23, and the mean age for men
was 25. The study included an equal number of males and females. The second
hypothesis was to determine whether men or women were more likely to be
addicted to the Internet.
The type of source was a research article from an accredited
university, Ariel University in Israel. The project conducted by the Department of Behavioral Science influenced the source by making the research article more
formal, scientific in the layout as they followed the scientific method, and
finally by their results being heavily supported by numbers and statistics. The source
also influenced the project immensely. If the source of the article wasn’t a research
article by a university and was a tweet perhaps, the researcher would not have
had to extrapolate data, structure it so properly or have had this data heavily
vetted and approved for publishing.
This project was extremely detailed. The
researchers developed a test that measured IAT (Internet Addiction Score), and methodically
applied different statistical analyses to evaluate the results. The only reason
I am skeptical of the broader applicability of the study is because the sample
size is made up of only students from one country, Israel. Israel is one of the
smaller countries in the world and is made up of such a specific demographic
where cultural, geographic or educational backgrounds are playing a role in the
findings. While I do think that the results might be identical in the United
States, we cannot definitively say that the results apply for the United States,
especially because the study does not denote national origin of each student.
The success level of this research and my assessment are directly
related. I believe that the research was very successful in providing further
evidence to the detriments of social anxiety and Internet Addiction, but the
sample size was from a very small country and demographic in the world raises doubt.
This source indisputably fits into my larger goal of this project,
to prove that there are significant detriments to technology, but they are
not just limited to social anxiety that was explored. It was extremely helpful
that the researchers took it a step further and analyzed whether specific
social networking platforms provided more social anxiety than others. The
research determined that there was no meaningful correlation between social
anxiety levels and a specific social networking platform. As stated in the
conclusion of this study, “The results of the study support previous evidence
for cooccurrence of Internet addiction and social anxiety, but further studies
need to clarify this association.” As I previously mentioned, this limited
sample size from one small country, needs to be studied further in other
countries to determine whether these results are the uniform throughout the
world. One reason I was drawn to this research over others was that these
researchers broke down the social anxiety into specified characteristics of
social anxiety that did have a correlation. As indicated here, “Our results
support findings of previous research showing an association between poor
social skills and excessive Internet use and that in males, fear, anxiety, and
depression were correlated positively with cognitions about problematic
Internet use.” Another statement, which specified characteristic and trait
correlations, was, “… problematic Internet users were more neurotic and less
extroverted, more socially anxious and emotionally lonely…”
Denis Baron’s, “ From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy
Technologies” takes the reader through a brief timeline of a few of the most
world altering communication technologies. These technologies include, writing,
the pencil, the telephone and the computer. Baron walks the reader through the
potential adoption process of a new communication technology. First, the
technology is restricted to only a few, then as costs decrease and hesitations
from the general public diminish, public adoption will progressively catch on. If
this communication technology is successful in both of the prior two steps, the
accessibility of the technology will then reach broader markets and
successfully alter how people communicate. This piece I believe falls
under the genre of a historical essay. Through this essay, Baron aims to
provide a historical, non-biased and informative viewpoint of how literacy
technology evolved.
I did find this essay extremely illuminating
and stimulating. Baron provided analysis on the often overlooked and
oversimplified path to electronic communication. Based on the perceived purpose and overall project of the author, through this essay he accurately shed light, and walked the reader through the
history of the evolution of literacy technologies, it was enormously successful.
Baron then progressed to write about the many efficiencies and advancements that stemmed
from the original literacy technologies. One example of the success of this
piece was explaining the evolution of literacy technology and provided an environmental
framework along within it. This can be found
under the conclusion section, “Even the pencil itself didn’t escape the wrath
of educators. One of the major technological advances in pencil-making occurred
in the early twentieth century when manufacturers learned to attach rubber tips
to inexpensive wood pencils by means of a brass clamp.” The success of this
piece is illustrated here. Baron provided a historical example of adoption of literacy
technology where he began to elegantly describe one of the greatest advancements
being the eraser, and the hesitance/resistance of adoption of the pencil. Every
single day, over 4 billion people use their phones to communicate through
Twitter, Facebook, texting, writing emails etc., all through a 6 inch by 2 inch
device. This all stemmed from wood and graphite. This source fits like a hand
in a glove with this course, as this course is centered around writing and
technology. I also find this to be quite
enlightening, because this article has gotten me to start thinking about the
negative effects that the technological evolution has brought upon society.
While this essay did provide an accurate history and a glimpse of
the problematic nature of relying too heavily on typing, which I will provide
examples for, it did not go far enough in explaining the detrimental nature of
relying too heavily on typing, computers and text. Don’t get me wrong,
computers and text processing make life so much easier, efficient and accurate
for everyone in many ways, but there are some definite negative effects that
are ignored too often in this piece. Under the section, “What Writing Does
Differently” it begins to allude to the many problems of communication through
technology. “Writing lacks such tonal cues of the
human voice such as pitch and
stress,” this is one of the many significant problems with the transition to
text. Messages are often misinterpreted because people cannot properly convey
tonal cues over text. Over the past few years, technological innovation has
provided mediums for convenient communication that allows for proper
representation of tonal cues and gestures. These technologies are FaceTime,
Skype and audio text messages instead of strictly words. Furthermore, this article overlooked that
kids don’t learn as well on computers, writing by hand yielded significantly
better retention of information over typing. Additionally, millennial's along
with the next generation are lacking social skills and overall development,
because they were born into a world of communicating through technology, rather
than face to face. This generation’s youth specifically are denied the
opportunity to make mistakes without consequences because everything is
recorded, documented, posted and shared on permanent social media communication
outlets within minutes, denying people the ability to live and learn from
mistakes. While computing, text processing and the overall evolution of
literacy technology undoubtedly increased efficiencies and can be attributed to
so many successes today, it is vital to identify the weaknesses of
technological communication methods.
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