Research Blog #4 The Effects of the Technological Demands on Students

Technology serves many purposes in the classroom environment especially during a prospering age when modern society creates great demands on such tools for communication and development. Although the advantage points are high and they serve many purposes for the structure of education and communication, technology has taken another tole on young people’s lives including students whom have utilized this advancement beyond its means into a territory of self-defeat. Technology has created a shift in the mental structure of students who grew up during this craze and through this shift, different aspects of their lives are affected. The culture of simulation has manifested into a multitude of directions in modern students’ life that affect both their personal and academic experiences. Some of these effects develop into illusions that create a confusion in the authentication of personal relationships, a dependency for technological interaction to suffice for their intellectual and emotional needs, and a disengagement and declination in their learning. However, students have no choice but subdue to the system in order to meet a growing job market. Due to the prospering job market that demands technologically advanced students, schools are compensating by creating curriculums that promote the use of computers. In other words, students need to become absorbed in technology in order to survive during a struggling economy and in doing so lose on other aspects of their lives that may be the result of a consumerist cycle that creates high demands for new technology.

The relevancy of the technological job market that ultimately feeds off the growing generation that is co-dependent on these tools intertwines with the privatization of academia that is nurturing these demands by creating curriculums that require extensive training in computers. Because of the privatization of education, schools need to stay relevant and up to date in order to keep up in a competitive market. In doing so, they create curriculums that promote majors with a high job availability. With the recent technological craze and dependency for these tools, the market for technology is expanding resulting in the increase of jobs that require students who have received the proper education. On the other hand, technology companies depend on these hungry young people who depend on their computers for their every need while creating a relationship with the schools to suffice for these needs. However, in the long run this cycle leads to a world of self-defeat and absorption creating a world where people simply cannot escape. Their computers no longer become tools, but “interactive objects” that “”spoke” to its user, pointed toward new kinds of experiences in which people did not so much command machines as to enter into conversations with them” as Turkle explains in Seeing through computers:education in a culture of simulation. The relationship between the user and the computer begins to evolve into a personal connection where a relationship or attachment begins to develop. Through this attachment, people are finding it harder to step away from their computers and face reality. In doing so, the idea of authentic relationships begins to play as a factor in the development in the psyche of how healthy interactions should be perceived. However, through the development of technology, people are finding it irrelevant to create personal relationships with people because their needs are being compensated digitally. In the article Authenticity in the age of digital companions, Turkle describes says “Human beings evolved in an environment that did not require them to distinguish between authentic and simulated relationships. Only since the advent of computers have people needed to develop criteria for what we consider to be “authentic” relationships, and for many people the very idea of developing these criteria does not seem essential.” Students grow manipulated attachments for the narratives they create landing them into a land of fairytale expectations as Turkle describes in How computers Change the way we think, “But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.

The fairytale land of technology can land students into serious trouble as they sit in the class scrolling through their news feed as a means to suppress any discomforts of boredom, however as they are doing so, their brain is being manipulated in a negative manner that affects their over all learning experience. In the book Information, Communication & Society, Paul Mihailidis mentions that “these tools predominately facilitate peer-to-peer communication, sharing and interactivity, they are disrupting traditional top-down information flow, at the same time integrating many different types of forms of content. With all of this information streaming into single feeds and aggregated space, seeing the diverse content that streams through these spaces can be difficult. This was reflected in the participants reluctance to acknowledge or advocate for positive or valuable uses of social media in general. This also poses a threat to recognizing accurate, balanced, and credible sources of information in peer-to-peer networks.” In result, the notion that an abundance of information is beneficial the mind is contradictory when examining the learning process of a student. Through the over exposure of different sources, students are finding it more difficult to distinguish what is true and what is false thus creating false information. Not only is technology disrupting the flow of information, it is also taking away from the process of learning. “Furthermore, technology use and technology studies by Juno (2012a,b) have examined the relationship Facebook use, time spent studying, and overall GPA. Results indicated that time spent on Facebook was strongly and negatively related to overall GPA while only weakly related to time spent studying.” (343, Lepp) Students are investing their time that they should be saving for education towards useless outlets that work as a self-defeating mechanism. Instead of preparing and planning their time for practical and beneficial activities, with tools that “were born as ‘social amplifiers, without any real context for concrete civic uses.” (344, Lepp) and eventually “If young people continue to see them as superficial social outlets then their ability to be used for diverse and inclusive means will be limited.” In this instance, technology no longer serves as a tool, however a mechanism that drives humans beings towards self-defeat in a space that promotes academia. Through these distractions, students lose context of information that results in a decreased desire to learn while depending on computers to do the work.

Alongside the emotional and intellectual struggles that students begin to face as the demand for technology increases, the over all mental and physical health begins to play as a factor. According to Andrew Lepp’s study called Relationship between cellphone use, academic performance, anxiety and satisfaction with Life in college students, “Rosen Carrier et al (2013), and Rosen, Whaling, Rab, Carrier an Cheever (2013) investigated anxiety related to technology use among a large sample of teens, young adults and adults. Their results show that not being able to connect with technology, particularly Facebook, text messages, and cell phone calls, as frequently as desired was associated with feelings of anxiety.” This also played in with the fact that “high cell phone users were less physically fit than low cell phone users. Interview data collected as part of the study explained the negative relationship by suggesting that CPUse disrupts physical activity behavior, causing high frequency users to be less physically active and more sedentary in comparison to low frequency users.” Concluding that the demand for technology to reconcile the emotional and intellectual needs of people is sacrificed for their over mental and physical health. With the rising addiction and need for computer use, when disabled, people begin to feel anxious and uncomfortable that may lead to other poor habits and health effects. Along with the frequent use of computers and lack of real life interaction, people spend most of their time in one spot for long periods of time leaving no time for exercise or physical movement, an essential for the health of a person.

In conclusion, people are sacrificing their essential needs for personal and physical interaction and the privilege to learn for the confinement and addiction for technological use. This creates a cycle that effects the privatization of education where the demands for technology continue to rise, not only in the private lives of people but their academics. This cycle is intended to supply the people that feed it creating a consumerist market that invests in technological company for all their needs. In result, creating a job market that is sufficed by institutions to provide educated students who know how to use computers. From this, the demand to use technology grows more in the classroom adding to the bombardment of simulation in a person’s life. Through this abundance, other aspects of that person’s life are neglected such as the need for personal interactions, intellectual growth and mental and physical well-being.