Richtel's Article About Technology

The Cambell family is definitely an extreme example in my opinion. The article "Your Brain on Computers: Attached to Technology and Paying a Price" (found here) was interesting at points. I couln't believe that their technology dependence was to a point where Mrs. Cambell burned her cookies twice in the same afternoon and Mr. Cambell forgot to pick up his own children from school. I believe those are self-control and priority issues, not the fault of the technology at hand. Technology, I feel is like any other tool. Tools can be used as intended or abused. I think of the saying "guns don't kill, people kill" as a similar correlation. Technology doesn't distract, people let themselves get distracted.

There were some interesting statistics in this article, too. The statistic that said people at work switch between windows, email, or other programs almost 37 times per hour seemed a bit high to me. I'm not sure either that switching between various documents or spread sheets count in this study. If it did, I would say that's just someone doing his or her job. If not and I was the boss, I'd be monitoring and blocking computer usage of the tested sample. But I find computers immensely useful. Commenting on this article is so much easier because I have it open in another Internet tab for reference as I write this.

Without a computer, heaven forbid, I wouldn't be able to do my job as an Intelligence Analyst in the military with half the efficiency that I'm able to now. While deployed, I spent nearly 10 hours a day at a computer station reading, communicating, making spread sheets and graphs. This just would not have been possible without my computer work station. Any major incident that happened in Southern Iraq was instant messaged straight to my work station from the first unit's analyst who knew about it.

While the distractions come as a part of it, (you only have to look at the page of the article that I linked above - the clutter of adds and applications make the site very distracting) you have to make a conscious effort to tune it out. This also falls back on the programmers who design sites, should take into consideration how distracting his or her media layout is. The New York Times site that I linked to is a disaster. Over 1/4 of that page is irrelevant to the article - various advertisements and links. The same can be said of the layout of this blog. With designs like these, it's no wonder people can't pay attention.