Jennifer Paphatsalang
Comm 103 – Szabo
8 October 2012
The Digital Nation Responses

I do agree that this effect that people are not learning and retaining as much information as they could if they were unplugged is possible because people are unable to fully divert their brains and focus on one thing when other digital input is distracting them. The evidence from Digital Nation shows that people are not as good at multi-tasking than they think and that they lose focus of what they must be paying attention too. I know that in my personal experiences, when I am typing a paper, I rarely type the whole thing without checking my phone, email, or social media sites. This does cause me to lose my thoughts, and like the students in Digital Nation, my paragraphs become very choppy. Carr finds that due to digital media, people are no longer searching for deeper understandings of information, but just finding the surface of information because it is easier and quicker. Another example is how people tend to skim articles online, rather than reading it in its entirety.

I do agree that the Millennials are impatient due to the fact that they have grown up in a world that requires instant gratification, however, I also think that they are not completely ignorant if they can utilize the digital media to learn in depth and over time. I think that the culture that we live in also affects Millennials. Our culture is so focused on faster technologies and want instant gratification that it becomes the norm for society. The negative consequences could be that certain information does not exist if it doesn’t load quick enough or it its not found on Google, or that our culture will stop digging in depth of issues because people are just skimming over it.