Martinez 1 Valentina Martinez Mendoza Kristen Foster CO150.403 28 October 2013 Technology: Our Form of Freedom or Condemnation?

The last few decades have introduced new forms of communication, entertainment, and learning options in the form of technology into our lives. Technological innovations such as, smartphones, laptops, video-games, the internet, and digital media have provided new possibilities of self-expression and interaction. Moreover, the human society has had rapidly accepted technology and converted it into a significant part of everyday activities. As a part of the society I must consent that everywhere I go I see at least one person with a cellphone in his/her hands (without taking into account that the one person could be me); This made me wonder if humanity is excessively relying on technology to the point where it is developing some sort of dependency on it. Accordingly, I decided to pursue this research project guided by the following question: Is technology helping us to improve our freedom and possibilities of selfexpression or is it making us dependent on it while leading us to negative outcomes? Through the process I made an emphasis on teenagers, because as a teenager I want to be considered a relevant stakeholder in this research topic. I decided to start my research by finding out the effects of technology and digital media on youths when technology had its first strong impact on society. I encountered a documentary that appeared in Frontline five years ago, in a period of time when technology was strongly influencing youths because of its tremendous innovations and possibilities to find information and interact with others.

Martinez 2 The documentary takes the viewers into the public but private online world of certain teenagers while addressing various perspectives from three different stakeholders on the topic, youths, parents, and teachers. As different perspectives, kids say that technology and digital media has given them a framework of freedom where they can express themselves without the continuous control of their parents over their identities development, thoughts, and actions. Parents, on the other hand are concerned, because they feel that their kids are expending too much time using technological devices and developing a new social life that they arent able to control. Lastly, teachers dont know how to entertain youths who expend so much of their time on digital media. This source also showed real-life examples and interviews that I personally considered shocking. One of them was about a girl who had created a Myspace account where she showed very sexy pictures of herself in underwear and with black, gothic make-up on her face. She had over a hundred online friends while in real life she was an introvert young girl, who was bullied in high school and didnt have many friends. She had two completely different identities that guided her to a situation where she had to depend on fake identities to avoid arguments with the people she loved. When her parents, teachers, and classmates found out about her secret identity, she was sadly despised by her mates and her online world was ruined. I was personally amazed after acknowledging all of the information that this documentary provided, because it was incredible to see how the internet was first introduced (within the video) as a very helpful tool but it ended up to be prejudicial for teens, parents and teachers (The last two stakeholders were harmed by technology, as they were worried for the youths). Moreover, I was concerned about the online identity development of youths and the way it was making them dependent on the lies they made up through the internet, so I went into the

Martinez 3 Academic Search Premier database and found the article "Tensions of Identity in a Networked Era: Young Peoples Perspectives on the Risks and Rewards of Online Self-Expression" by Katie Davis. The article implies that technological advances and digital media have provided new forms of self-expression that can lead teenagers to develop multi-faceted personalities. The article conducted interviews to 24 youths, where the main idea was based on the possible reactions of teens if they find out that one of their friends has multiple identities. The factual information of the text suggests that new technologies and digital multimedia allows people to express a multi-faceted self. However, there is an obligation to maintain a sense of consistency among ones multiple selves(6) which from my point of view, means that the freedom provided by the internet leads to a dependency on maintaining a harmony between the online and offline features of a persons identity. Accordingly, I was realized that the last two sources implied similar outcomes of technology on the identity development of a teen. Moreover, I draw a similar conclusion: even though technology is meant to be helpful it can also harm certain aspects of peoples lives. I continued my research as I decided that I wanted to know different impacts of technology besides the ones that can have on identity development. As I continued looking for more information I found the article Is Technology Making us Stupid (and Smarter)? which was published in Psychology Today magazine. The title certainly caught my attention and the information provided within the text was also interesting. The author, Tomas ChamorroPremuzic, who is a business psychology professor at the University College London, recalls technological devices to be a significant (if not necessary) part of our everyday lives. He considers the internet as a technological tool that boosts our intelligence. Moreover, he explains intelligence as a collaboration of two intellect forms, fluid and crystallized

Martinez 4 intelligence. The first one is the ability to gather information while the second one is the capacity to store and actually know the information. Accordingly, he states that humans are like technological devices, their ability to solve problems depends not on the knowledge they can store but on their capacity to connect to a place where they can retrieve the answer to find a solution. Therefore, technology is helping us to find the information we need, which nowadays is more important and efficient than the actual knowledge we have stored in our brains. So its continuous usage will lead humanity to a dependency on knowing how to use technology because the inability to use it would be considered an intellectual disadvantage. This source enhanced my train of thoughts about the benefits of technological devices, such as the easiness to access to information in seconds, though it can lead humanity to a technological dependency. I was amazed by how all of the sources implied benefits of technology that turned into negative outcomes. I decided to keep looking for more information that could show the opposite opinion of the last source. More specifically I was looking for a source that could explain how the continuous usage of technological devices can affect our intellectual efficiency. I found an article published in the New York Times, written under the title Brain, Interrupted by Hugh Thompson and Bob Sullivan. The information provided within the article implied that technology gave its users the opportunity to multitask. This occurs because of the multiple interruptions from digital media sites (Facebook, twitter, messenger, etc.) that a person can experience while conducting any other activity. However, those interruptions can lead to a deficiency in the normal function of the brain. To support this idea, the authors asked a professor of technological information called Alessandro Acquisti to conduct an experiment that could measure the loss of brain power when a person is interrupted. Within the experiment, 136 people were divided into three groups and

Martinez 5 taken into a laboratory, where each group was asked to take a test. The first group conducts the test in normal settings, while the second one was interrupted, and the third one was told that it was going to be interrupted but it never was. The performances of the interrupted groups decrease 20% in the first try but in the second round it only diminished a 14%. The experiment conclude that even though distractions that come from technological devices weaken the efficiency of the human brain power, it can be possible to train ourselves for those distractions, in order to conduct a more efficient multi-tasking. This data caught me off guard, because as a youth I am constantly interrupted by digital media interactions through my cellphone, and never realized the lack of productivity and efficiency it was developing in my brain while conducting any other activity. I decided I wanted to extend my knowledge on similar effects of technology to help answer my research question. I went into the Academic Search Premier database and found the article "Technology and the Interrupted Brain" written by Pat Galatan. This article cited more than one reliable source and intellectual author to show two perspectives about technology. Galatan first introduces the negative effects of technology as it is affecting our ability to learn. He cites Nicholas Carr, who is the author of the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and stands in opposition of the continuous usage of technology to learn, mainly because it provides constant distractions that fill our shortterm memory with unnecessary data while crowding out information that our brain should be relocating into our long-term memory. Galatan also provides some points of view that stand in opposition of what the author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote on his article Is Technology Making us Stupid (and Smarter)? (That was stated earlier in this exploratory essay). He says that Over-reliance on the internet for information impedes real knowledge creation and expands

Martinez 6 this statement by saying that knowing actual data is more noteworthy than knowing how to Google for information, according to a cognitive science research. Later in the text, Galatan shows the perspective that is in favor of technology and the internet and cites some intellectual authors such as, Clive Thompson, Tomas ChamorroPremuzic and Annie Murphy Paul. The last one implies that all of the possibilities provided by the internet and technology can be managed in ways that maximize mental acuity. This source was able to enhance both, positive and negative perspectives about technology. Lastly, I thought I wanted to gather more information that expresses why people, especially teens consider technology a form of self-expression. I found the article Social Media Explosion within the CQ Researcher. Within the text the author stated that technology and mainly the internet is considered a wonderful tool to interact with friends, however after some time of continuous usage it could end up having serious effects on privacy and offline interactions. Along with the text, the author keeps the idea of technological devices and social media as a common tool that helps youths to maintain long distance relationships and intensify the closer ones. Accordingly, the author implies that people has gotten more comfortable sharing their personal information with people they dont know very well, though that confidence is not always taken to the offline settings, where face-to-face conversations are becoming harder to manage, mainly because teens rather have online conversations. This source also implies that technology provides benefits to the community to a limit. Whenever the limit is passed technology could also produce negative outcomes, such as privacy issues and real life interactions. This research process on technology as form of self-expression or a form of dependency has helped me realize about many factors that I wasnt very aware of before. I had never

Martinez 7 considered before this research, the tons of opportunities of identity development that the internet is able to provide. I also wasnt realizing how much of my time I am spending on checking my devices, and the many times I have to stop any kind of activity I am conducting to message my friends and read new posts on Facebook. Now that I accept that I continuously use and need technology, I certainly agree with some authors like, Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, with the idea of technological devices interrupting the efficiency of my train of thoughts and the productivity of my time.

Martinez 8 Works Cited Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. Is Technology Making us Stupid (and Smarter)? Psychology Today. Sussex Publisher. 7 May 2013. Web. 19 October 2013. Clemmitt, Marcia. "Social Media Explosion." CQ Researcher. 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2013. Davis, Katie. "Tensions of Identity in a Networked Era: Young Peoples Perspectives on the Risks and Rewards of Online Self-Expression." New Media & Society 14.4 (2012): 634651. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Oct. 2013. Frontline U.S. TV Series. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. Galatan, Pat. "Technology and the Interrupted Brain." T+D 67.9 (2013): 22-25. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. Growing up Online. Frontline. Pbs. WGBH, Boston. 22 January 2008. Digital File. Sullivan, Bob. Thompson, Hugh. Brain, Interrupted. The New York Times. Nytimes.com. 3 May 2013. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. Psychology Today. Sussex Publisher LLC, n.d. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.