"Attached to Technology and Paying the Price" article

For our first assignment we had to read the article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?_r=1
named "Attached to Technology and Paying the Price." This article mainly talks about how technology is rewiring our brains and causing us to lose focus. It cites the Campbell family who have all types of technology which they use constantly. At any given time the father could be using over 10 different applications, using 3 different computer screens at once. It was no surprise to me that he didn't notice an email offering him $1.3 million for almost 2 weeks.

The article talks about how this inability to focus hurts other aspects, such as the ability to cook something without burning it. People get distracted and forget that they have stuff in the oven. This actually happened to me once. I had started boiling some water to amke some soup, and then I got distracted with some technology and forgot the pot was on the stove. All of the water had evaporated and it started to create smoke which I didn't even notice until jsut before the fire alarm went off. Technology really does affect our inability to focus.

It also talks about how technology may have caused the children to recieve poor grades. The son mentioned in the article had a ton of  programs and applications available to him on his computer, and he blamed that for his inability to focus on studying. I also find myself sometimes distracted when I'm in the middle of something, but I try to maintain some self-discipline. If something interests me, I might open the link in a new tab, and then add it to my favorites and come back later. Or I might open it in a new window and minimize it until I have finished what I need to get done. I understand that there may be distractions, but I don't believe that means you can use that as an excuse for poor grades. I believe the main reason the son wasn't doing well was because he didn't have good self-discipline, although the distractions did play a part in it.

I do believe that todays technology affects the way we think and our ability to focus. I grew up in a family that didn't like to use a lot of technology. For half of my lifetime we did not have television, if we wanted entertainment we walked to the library and checked out a couple of books. We had a computer but barely ever used it other than to do research for school assignments, upon which we still focused on library books for research. Only in the past few years have our family started accepting new technologies, and I already see the lack of focus in things such as schoolwork. I just installed Skype about a month ago, and it has distracted me a couple of times when I see someone is online and sent me a message. I have a tendency to try to hold up a conversation while I do my assignments or whatever i may have been doing at the time.