Digital Nation

I really enjoyed watching Digital Nation. It is obvious that people increasingly connecting their lives to the internet. College campus' all over the country are moving towards making the entire campus wireless accessible and it is interesting to see the research people are putting into this. Compared to students at MIT, I'm barely on the internet. It was shocking to hear how often they were online doing something. It really shouldn't have been shocking to me though since Blackberry's and iPhones keep people constantly connected.

Multitasking has become a way of life for our generation and as the video points out, we all believe that we are experts at it. One of the girls who was interviewed said teachers need to accept that we multitask and we are good at it which was really funny since it was followed with the studies that showed how performance drops when there are multiple distractions. Instead of doing one thing well, multitaskers succeed at doing poorly in multiple ways.

What was most interesting to me was the section about brain activity while reading vs. while on the internet. It showed more activity while on the internet which is not what I expected at all. I guess it is because it is more stimulating visually. I was further surprised when we learned that more activity isn't necessarily better. I think he even referred to the brain like golf where a lower score is better. I'm curious as to what the significance of reading a book online would be, or even reading the news from a website. Will that lead to more or less brain activity and what would that mean for people? Hopefully they go more into it and eventually touch on the idea of being addicted to the internet or video games.