What has ‘Technologic’ done to us?

Karl Sadkowski/Opinion Editor

The world moves fast.

As ever-expanding technology hurries humanity at a sometimes-rampant pace, many people are simply doing all they can to keep up.

Multitasking shapes the lives of people more than ever before.

An attempt to complete various tasks simultaneously, multitasking today can especially be driven by a person’s desire to prove self-worth.

Many high school students, for example, struggle in balancing heavy course loads with numerous extracurricular activities in order to pad their resumes for admissions committees at colleges and universities.

The mounds of work they must sift through are often overwhelming, and in order to save time, they produce sloppy results.

But is multitasking new?

It certainly is in the face of education.

Though multitasking may have entailed different tasks in the past, people have always felt the pressures of keeping up and considered technology only a helpful aid when available.

Today, however, technology, in all its glory, has given multitasking a new name.

Electronic communication in the forms of the Internet and mobile devices is the first culprit of over-complicated work that is persistent in distracting a person with wall posts, tweets and text messages.

But a stressed out student worried about college admissions could easily eliminate these unnecessary knots in productivity by simply getting over the insecure desire to make status updates and needlessly check up on the lives of others every hour.

A person shouldn’t divide his mind into more than the two halves he’s got already.

Filtering immediate duties from the bombardment of disturbances offered by technology’s devices is key in producing good work.

Clifford Nass, a psychologist at Stanford University, conducted an experiment involving two groups of heavy and light multitaskers to determine whether the ability to discern relevant information was inhibited by distractions.

Not surprisingly, the group of light multitaskers fared better.

What’s more, the group of light multitaskers actually worked faster than the other group, debunking the myth among many students stating that they work more efficiently when multitasking.

The alienated minority that just can’t seem to catch on to multitasking has finally gotten the upper hand.

Multitasking is ineffective.

Though education coupled with technology is reaching new limits today, one must learn to discern real work from its look-alike counterparts.

Put to sleep the hounds of distraction and say hello to productivity once again.

Though withdrawal effects are typical in this process, you’ll survive and be grateful later.

Seriously, slowing down will speed things up.

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