The Worlds Biggest Distraction

            In class this week we had some interesting discussions. The debate about whether or not Facebook would be around for the foreseeable future had many good talking points that I wasn’t able to think of on my own. While I still believe that it will be replaced eventually, I can now see that it will take something huge to take it down. The best argument that I heard for why that was is the fact that Facebook as a company has learned how to constantly evolve to include new features while not completely redesigning its whole structure. This model allows it to attract younger and more tech savvy people while maintaining its older and more basic client base. With this now apparent to me, it is easy to see that Facebook will continue to be the dominant social media for the foreseeable future. One talking point on this subject for why Facebook killed previous social media sites is the fact that it came about at just the right time with the increasing prevalence of smart phones. Without the increase in apps and so forth I believe that Facebook would have died off long ago with the majority of their usage coming from mobile devices. This fact will lead into our next talking point on how this access to social media on mobile devices has affected our everyday lives. With increasing amounts of distraction there has been many negative effects such as more multi-tasking and less human interaction. Both of these factors have lead to lower quality relationships and therefore less fulfillment. Living with so many constant distractions has led many people to believe that they can do multiple things at once and do them well. The research we looked at in class showed that it is not possible to do more than one thing at once and not have one or both of your tasks take a hit in quality. While this had always been intuitive to me for high cognitive tasks such as studying for a test it never occurred to me that this rule applied to basic tasks as well. I also believe that as a generation that has grown up with these distractions we have lost our ability to focus intently on anything, and have become more susceptible to taking things at a superficial level. The basis for my thoughts on this was the fact that we were only able to detect one or two changes of the 20 some made in the video.

            The last topic we talked about briefly in class was the concept of how much further the next generations will be able to go technologically due to not having grown up with the earthly first and second orders of organization. It has been made apparent to me that most of the inventions made in time could hardly be imagined by the previous generations. It is with these thoughts that I leave you with a parting truth, Technology will continue to change the way that humans interact with each other.