This addiction to the internet has become an epidemic that I believe has spurned some antisocial behavior. Take the popular website Netflix. As of January 2014, Netflix had 44 million subscribers. And yet, Netflix itself is not a social media network. That is a lot of users for a website that is ultimately a very solitary activity. Just as it is easy to spend hours watching YouTube videos, it's even easier to spend more hours binge watching Netflix. Over Spring Break I was sick and spent Friday and Saturday in bed. During that time, I watched 23 episodes of the show Veronica Mars (judge me now). Each episode is about 40 minutes long. I'm average enough at math to know that this certainly meets the criteria of binge watching a television show.
We are constantly juggling so much information, it is difficult to process. During the time I was watching all these episodes, of course I was on my phone playing Scramble with friends, on twitter, and scrolling through tumblr. I'd look back at the screen 20 minutes later, thinking I would have some idea of what was going on in that episode since I had been listening to it in the background, and yet, I was completely lost and would have to rewind (or whatever you would call that on Netflix...) back to the spot I was at before I became transfixed on my phone. Was I able to process or deeply think about the television show as I was jumping from one app on my phone to the other? Obviously not since I had to start the episode over. The internet has created a society great in multitasking, but how great at that multitasking exactly are we? Is the multitasking strictly surface level? The chart below shows just how much our age group (16-24) "multitasks" with all our different media activities.
Katie, I completely agree. The Internet is our main source of information and communication, and because of this, we're extremely reliant on it. When we find information on the Internet, most of the time we assume that all of the information we find is accurate because we don't want to look for further information that supports what we've already found. For communication, we're dependent on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, and for some, this depicts the hierarchy of popularity, which is ridiculous. Our dependence on the Internet shapes our minds and allows us to think a certain way, when we should really use the knowledge and experiences we have do that for us.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree as well. The Internet has changed the way we think. As we surf the web we are not really present. We aren't thinking deeply about anything. We jump from link to link without even thinking about our physical actions like moving the mouse, closing and opening windows, or striking keys. We just go through the motions becuase that is what we have leanred to do, and because that is how we get the most information possible (well, not necessarily that we soak it all in). It's a tragedy how our brains are changing, and I do not think that they are changing for the better, unfortunately.
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