HON 1515 - Week Three

This week in Dissecting the Internet I got to do two of my favorite things:  watching movies and DEBATING!

A debate was one of my original suggestions for the class, so I was extremely excited when I heard we would be watching a video called "Digital Nation" and then debating/discussing the points mentioned in the video afterward.

On Tuesday, when we spent our class period watching this video. I learned several new and interesting things about how technology can be both beneficial and hazardous to one's brain and well-being.  I never before knew that people could actually die from playing video games for 50 hours straight or that there were camps for those addicted to computers called Internet Rescue Camps.  I especially enjoyed hearing conflicting points of view on whether multitasking is a necessary/good thing or something that actually makes you move slower and become much more distracted.

I personally believe a little bit of both.  I know that technology has an effect on my not being able to concentrate on one thing for a long amount of time.  Multitasking can definitely be essential in today's hectic world; however, people of our generation (myself included) need to learn how to concentrate solely on the task at hand for a decent amount of time before switching to another task.

On Thursday came the fun part.  We got to debate and share our ideas, such as those that I just shared above.  I love debating and have been told that I am good at arguing my point, so debate has always been so fun for me.  I tend to get nervous when I first start speaking, but once I had brought up one point on Thursday I had the confidence to comment on most of the issues we discussed.  I found it really interesting to see what my classmates views were or hear their personal stories about how technology has hurt, aided, or distracted them on the past.  My favorite examples were those about students' mothers either being stellar multitaskers or not being able to focus on holding a conversation with their own kids if they are busy texting or surfing the web.

I was so excited to see that we will be discussing more this week!  I'm looking forward to hearing what else everyone has to share about the impacts of technology and finding out what other facts we can agree or disagree about when it comes to the internet.