Too much time with technology?

Would it seem plausible that having your children watch Sesame Street rewires their brains? Or that raising children to be dependent on television and other technology for entertainment makes their teachers’ jobs more difficult? Letting kids use media technology such as cell phones, watching TV and listening to MP3s exposes them to even more sensory input — stimuli — than the average classroom teacher can provide. Consequently, lessons given by the teacher can become boring and repetitive when a 5-year-old is learning numbers and the alphabet via flashing symbols and animation.The total time spent each day using media increased seven hours for the average child since 2005. TV is the leading media, and kids have gone from watching 38 minutes a day in 2005 to four hours and 29 minutes in 2009. The entire content streams have gone from about two hours to nine hours, not including texting or media multitasking. When multiple electronics are being used in conjunction with one another, it is called media multitasking. Kids are logging over 11 hours a day media multitasking, and heavy media multitaskers are logging 16 hours or more. On average, children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend one hour and 35 minutes sending and receiving texts in one day. All of this has been proven to spike between the ages of 11 and 14. Children are spending over half their day on the computer, watching television or tuning out the world listening to music. All this virtual stimulation provided by media technology infringes on brain development, which is occurring until the age of 11 and beyond. The three stages, starting from the age they learn to talk, include learning to be selectively attentive, and paramount, developing sustained attention. Children are losing all these abilities, meaning they cannot focus their attention for as long as past generations could have. Teens and kids can quickly get bored or distracted because of the lack of sensory input daily tasks provide. They have become too adjusted to continuous streams of entertainment or exciting, convenient ways of completing tasks. Tools such as calculators and spell check have become more evident than ever in society. Such things degrade learning to the extent where it stagnates parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, making deep thoughts and analyzing information a thing of the past. It can become hard to apply rules to a problem, such as in algebra. One may know how to solve the problem, but never ask why or how they got that answer. Will asking “why?” become extinct? Today, children consider pastimes as being online chatting with friends or playing video games. Seventy-four percent of seventh- through 12th-graders have social networking profiles, such as Facebook or Twitter. Students in middle and high school are using terms of addiction to characterize their dependence on media, and elementary kids are not far behind. Great things of the past are fading. Reading print material — books, magazines, newspapers — has dropped about 20 percent in 10 years, from 42 percent in 1999 to 23 percent in 2009.Among recent studies in teens, the rate of ADHD has soared 42 percent. Researchers are seeing increases in virtually all psychiatric conditions — autism, depression, ADHD, bipolar syndrome in children. This suggests that parents and educators may be managing a larger and different population than they were four years ago. If media technology is our future and society is changing to accommodate the depleting attention span of this generation’s children, a scary question comes about. What will happen to all the analysts and thinkers? Emily Sullivan is an eighth-grader at Salisbury Central School.

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