Reading Response #4 forgot to post

5/4/2010

Cai Pencil

Reading Response # 4

In this Front Line documentary “Digital Nation”, an award winning journalist and accomplished film producer, Rachel Dretzin, who is joint partners in Ark Media, a documentary production company based out of Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Barak Goodman, and her correspondent Douglas Rushkoff, the first to win a Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement for Public Intellectual Activity, best seller of 10 books on new media and popular culture, approaches researching the diversity of concerns, hopes, and personal experiences of people around the world regarding the integration of digital devices with our 21st Century life. As Rachel and, go around the United States and even Korea, they find very different communities and treatments of the life lived today with digital devices. From early childhood education to grade, middle, high school, and even college to massive community of gamers, and military technological advances they cover a full spectrum of how this “Digital Nation” is affecting all of us.

Throughout this documentary, issues from attention retardation, video game and computer addiction (they even have computer free camps in Korea), multi tasking for students creating distractions in class as they become more and more digital, teaching the future generations how to use the Internet and technologies in a proper manner to encourage the youth to be responsible with the use of digital media and resources(in Korea, they even have a computer and internet song for children to sing in early education ), research on PTS disorders for soldiers through 3D simulations, relationship that grow over internet such as ones between gamers, Even war, but does not leave out the marvels of these inventions either, in essence, the issue of what the integration of digital devices are doing to our lives and our minds.

Although some argue that the digital media and devices will affect our ability to saturate our minds with knowledge (similar to the abilities of Almeric singers centuries ago could recite unthinkable numbers of poems) can’t be obtained by the convenience of quick links and scanning headlines, I do agree that these disorders created through the overuse of the Internet and other digital devices such as game and Internet addiction, and attention retardation can be corrected with a bit of patience and direction. My personal experience with this idea is that I have seen both sides of this argument. On one hand I have lived with interactions and distractions of the distractions created through digital devices and have become unable to use my mind to keep concentration to practice the deep thinking. On the other hand as I realize more and more of the distractions and convenience of the digital devices creates, I have been more aware of the consumption of time it requires out of my daily life. As I realize this I have become more active in my own life to engage in things that are not so conveniently placed their in brief summaries I can just scan over, but now try to read books and understand a subject in more depth. So in the end I came to the conclusion that if we where to introduce proper use of digital devices, media, and resources into school and limit the use of distracting activities like games and social sites life Facebook we might be able to obtained the combined reality of being technologically advanced and involved in deep thinking that has brought us to be who we are today as a whole.