How Technology Affects Attention Span

One of the major ways that technology is affecting children today involve their attention span. Our attention span is all about how long we can mentally keep focus on a certain activity. It also relies on patience. Kids today that have access to technology such as computers, iPads, and the sorts at such an early age is decreasing their attention span. How many of you get impatient when an Internet page takes longer than a few seconds to load? If I had to be honest, I would admit that I have closed many pages due to its' load time. From my own experience, I can believe that the Internet is correlated with increased impatience and decreased attention span. Before there was Internet, using a computer was all about Minesweeper, Pinball, and Paint - which none required loading - but now you can open a hundred different tabs on a browser, quickly moving back and forth between them. I know that for myself, this is the case. I can have ten tabs open and spend about ten minutes on each page before having the urge to move on and look through my other open tabs. The impatience comes when you are accustomed to having everything load quickly within seconds to having to wait. This generation is taught that plugging something into Google search will give you millions of results or answers within 0.39 seconds. I don't think I have ever seen Google search display any time that was longer than 60 seconds.

There is an article called, "How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus" that I found on Psychology Today which uses cognitive science to support the claim that technology is decreasing the attention span of kids. It asserts that with technology, kids learn to skim and divide their attention between several activities. This causes them to lose focus on a single activity, which is where the decline in attention span comes from. As mentioned earlier, this may stem from things such as having multiple tabs and activities open at once while you are trying to split up the time you spend with each of those tabs. How much are you retaining?

Here are a few simple things to keep in mind about technology and attention span:

• Before technology - majority of time spent reading books, which requires full attention, concentration, imagination, and memory of events
• Television era - visual stimulation, minimum imagination use, and minimum attention needed
• Internet era - vast environment, plenty of distractions, no focus or memorization needed
• Internet opens up a variety of things to do BUT:
• Too many things to do eliminates need to focus on a single activity
• Always available search engines eliminate the need to memorize info

After reading this post, do you see any of these points as being true to your Internet usage? I sure do. As I continue to make more blog posts, I will examine other ways that technology and entertainment media affects kids today.