During this weeks learning, I was actually quite surprised to see a piece of work that did not directly attack technology in learning or use the phrase, “kids these days” in their arguments. It was pretty refreshing to finally see a article that looks at the way millennials use and learn about technology. Most importantly, I enjoyed how it suggested that with the development of technology, there are more resources available to individuals. With the easiness and sheer availability of all these resources, the individual can play an active role in their education.
I think what bothers older generations the most is the quickness of independence that technology can provide. There is no longer an authoritative figure that stands in front of the school room, telling the children everything about everything. Those generations had to rely on the technology available to them at the time, books, to pursue their own interests. Now we can google a topic and know the basic concepts of a topic in less than a minute. To me, that speed of knowledge would be off-putting if I had to spend the day going to the library, using the Dewey Decimal system to find the correct book, then reading until you found the topic you actually wanted to learn about. The speed of learning is important to us, but also the availability of these resources. Even at an early age we are surrounded with technology. Starting out so young learning about the world at our own pleasure and speed will obviously make us feel more independent. Knowing how to count and recite the alphabet before we even start kindergarten is going to make us harder to teach and socialize with. It is not that technology necessarily only downplayed social skills, but it increased our self-reliance. We have become the hardest generation to market to because we want to feel that we found out about a product by ourselves, not from someone telling us.
Has technology actually affected our social skills? Or do we know about these skills and just choose to become more independent?
I agree with Tucker here in that older generations dislike the quickness and the independence of the internet and modern technologies.
I believe that technology has affected our social skills in ways that have proven to be beneficial and hindering to the development of our society. On one hand technology has given us the opportunity to reach people and places that were unobtainable in years prior. We can now Skype with Indonesia for free and map the Sahara Desert via Google earth and a system of cameras. On the other hand people hide behind computer screens and can carefully plan out their next sentence before “speaking” it. I for one have no difficulty posting on the blog for class, because I can carefully plan out what I want to say, but in class I struggle with putting words together in front of people. It could be that I am just extremely shy and I have a slight stutter which I am self conscious about, but behind a computer screen I am stutter free and can plan out my words.
I like the idea of the quickness of technology and the speed of knowledge. I don’t know if these technologies have stunted our social development, but I would definitely say that it has changed the way in which people interact. From my personal experiences, a lot of my friends spend a large amount of time on their phone. There will be times when I will look around and see that, out of a room of 7, I am the only one not on their phone. However, most of the time, these phones are used to facilitate social interactions. Oftentimes my friends will find things on their phone and show other people, creating a different form of social interaction that would never have occurred previously. Also, I think that the speed of knowledge has gotten rid of the concept of trivia. Whenever anybody has a question, it takes seconds to look it up. Because of this, random knowledge doesn’t really matter any more. It doesn’t matter if I know that the asshole guy in “Bridesmaids” is John Hamm or not; I can just look it up.
I think something interesting Tucker brought up here is the possible reasoning behind our elders not approving of technology. I often assume it is because that it is “destroying our ability to interact socially” or “it makes us impatient” or “it is killing time you could spend reading a great American novel”…but in this post Tucker is exploring the idea that it could solely be about not feeling as though they have authority. This is intriguing to me because of our discussion in class where I mentioned times where role reversial occurs at my work and I feel as though that this is what I was getting at. Authority feels somewhat irrelevant nowadays because of the advances in technology. We have boy/girl geniuses, and CEO’s that are 30, heck my brothers girlfriend is making almost $80,000/year working part time and she is only a few months older than me! With technology developing so quickly it is giving people the chances to be more educated than ever. This was an awesome way to approach the views on technology and I commend Tucker for this.
I’m wondering if the whole “authority” or “speed” of learning is the real issue. I’ve always understood it as more of a responsibility issue. Tucker explores the idea of technology providing freedom quickly, but I see it as relieving the generation of the responsibility to learn. With information easily available, why would anyone take the time to learn something, wholly and honestly. Technology seems to relieve the generation of having to actually know the answer to problems, because they can solve them with a simple swish of the right index finger. Are we becoming more independent or dependent on the information of others? It just seems like there is little work done to actually acquire information and thus less meaningful information sticks.
I wonder how the constant accessibility provided by smartphones and social networking affects our capacity to be alone–are young people less capable to interact with themselves?
I see a lot of young people who text, facebook, tweet, instagram, etc, almost compulsively. It doesn’t seem to be something they enjoy doing, so much as something that’s an ingrained part of their daily life. When you tell students not to use their phone in class, not many of them put it away for 50 or so minutes, they either take it out in intervals or find a way to obscure it for continuous use.
That seems unhealthy to me, that a considerable portion of young people can’t disconnect. A majority of the reading this week focused on the self reliance and autonomy engendered by technology, but the uses mentioned were almost exclusively socially interactive.