Digital Nation II

This documentary had me very torn on my feelings towards the effects of technology on modern society. Each individual story showed the pros and cons of the technology movement to the point that it was difficult to discern whether the good outweighed the bad or vice versa. The main issue seems to be society's renewed focus on what the documentary called "instant gratification"- that as a whole, we are no longer willing to use patience and hard work to get results. We want what we want when we want it. Also, as the narrator pointed out, everyone now seems prone to a complete lack of focus or concentration; instead almost every computer user is easily thrown off course or at least temporarily deterred from the task at hand by some random urge or new lead to follow.

This seemed especially noticeable in the clips about students- both middle school and college level students. For the middle schoolers, the rise of technology was greatly benefiting their work, though the teachers needed to be increasingly inventive in the ways of learning. However, at the college level, technology is merely a distraction and the students were more prone to think and work in what they called "bursts" or "snippets"- only using short term thinking processes. I think this emphasizes the never-ending debate of technology's benefits vs risks. In the end, the main focus is simply on the fact that it is inevitably changing us. Technology helps and hinders learning, it causes addiction, it broadens the professional world, the list goes on and on. But whether the effects are positive or negative is irrelevant- technology is a fast-moving world that eventually everyone is going to need to become a member of- or risk falling behind.