The 4 Ways Technology Affects our Children’s Thinking
The effects of technology on children are complicated. Whether technology helps or hurts in the development of your children’s thinking depends on what specific technology is used and how and with what frequency it is used.
Research shows the areas in which technology has the greatest impact on how children think are: attention, information overload, decision-making, and memory/learning. Importantly, all of these areas are ones in which you can have a counteracting influence on how technology affects your children. Negative indications are that attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are reduced and there's a marked reduction in the ability to think abstractly. But is technology all bad? Not according to everyone.
Attention
You can think of attention as the gateway to thinking. Without it, other aspects of thinking, namely, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making are greatly diminished or can’t occur at all.
Today’s children, the digital natives, are immediately thrust into a vastly different environment in which, because distraction is the norm, consistent attention is impossible, imagination is unnecessary, and memory is inhibited.
Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. Reading develops reflection, critical thinking, problem solving, and vocabulary better than visual media. Video games and other screen media improve visual-spatial capabilities, increase attentional ability, reaction times, and the capacity to identify details among clutter. So technology better prepares our children for jobs, such as air traffic controllers, than jobs that are more analytical, such as accounting.
Information Overload
The Internet holds a vast amount of information. One estimate holds that information doubles in the world every 72 days. The Library of Congress catalogues over 7,000 new items each day. More than 2,000 new websites go online each day. A minimum of two thousand books are published world wide each day.
British author and psychologist David Lewis, Ph.D., says that “having too much information can be as dangerous as having too little. It can lead to a paralysis of analysis, making it harder to find the right solutions or make decisions.” Our kids are having to learn how to deal with a world of unrelenting exponential growth of information.
Decision-making
With the emergence of the Web, email, mobile phones with cameras, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, gossip web sites, there are newer, faster and more creative ways to have dreadful decision making illuminated for anyone with an Internet connection to see. The technological developments of the last decade have made poor decision making easier, more immediate and more widely consequential. Technology discourages children from thinking and deliberation and promotes acting on their most base impulses, emotion and needs - anger, fear or the need for approval.
Poorly thought-out reaction can now occur in a matter of seconds, with fewer than 140 characters, and can subsequently be broadcast to millions in a matter of minutes. Making horrendous decisions has never been easier or faster for children. The immediate and collateral damage can be staggering in comparison to generations past.
Memory/learning
Does your child need help with math, spelling, languages or science? A major benefit to technology is the ability to search and find help from a vast array of sources. Old-fashioned tutoring has a new competitor in the form of education assistance online. The prevalence of information that can be found digitally has made learning – and teaching – a lot easier for both parents and their children.
However, there is a flip side to the ease with which information can now be found via technology, and more specifically, the Internet. Knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually retaining that knowledge in their brains. Basically, our kids are learning to remember less by knowing where information can be found.
The positive aspect of this is given the ease with which information can be found these days, not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem solving.
So what should parents take away from all this?
The bottom line is that too much screen time and not enough other activities, such as reading, playing games, and good old unstructured and imaginative play, will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.
The effects of technology on children are complicated. Whether technology helps or hurts in the development of your children’s thinking depends on what specific technology is used and how and with what frequency it is used.
Research shows the areas in which technology has the greatest impact on how children think are: attention, information overload, decision-making, and memory/learning. Importantly, all of these areas are ones in which you can have a counteracting influence on how technology affects your children. Negative indications are that attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are reduced and there's a marked reduction in the ability to think abstractly. But is technology all bad? Not according to everyone.
Attention
You can think of attention as the gateway to thinking. Without it, other aspects of thinking, namely, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making are greatly diminished or can’t occur at all.
Today’s children, the digital natives, are immediately thrust into a vastly different environment in which, because distraction is the norm, consistent attention is impossible, imagination is unnecessary, and memory is inhibited.
Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. Reading develops reflection, critical thinking, problem solving, and vocabulary better than visual media. Video games and other screen media improve visual-spatial capabilities, increase attentional ability, reaction times, and the capacity to identify details among clutter. So technology better prepares our children for jobs, such as air traffic controllers, than jobs that are more analytical, such as accounting.
The Internet holds a vast amount of information. One estimate holds that information doubles in the world every 72 days. The Library of Congress catalogues over 7,000 new items each day. More than 2,000 new websites go online each day. A minimum of two thousand books are published world wide each day.
British author and psychologist David Lewis, Ph.D., says that “having too much information can be as dangerous as having too little. It can lead to a paralysis of analysis, making it harder to find the right solutions or make decisions.” Our kids are having to learn how to deal with a world of unrelenting exponential growth of information.
With the emergence of the Web, email, mobile phones with cameras, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, gossip web sites, there are newer, faster and more creative ways to have dreadful decision making illuminated for anyone with an Internet connection to see. The technological developments of the last decade have made poor decision making easier, more immediate and more widely consequential. Technology discourages children from thinking and deliberation and promotes acting on their most base impulses, emotion and needs - anger, fear or the need for approval.
Poorly thought-out reaction can now occur in a matter of seconds, with fewer than 140 characters, and can subsequently be broadcast to millions in a matter of minutes. Making horrendous decisions has never been easier or faster for children. The immediate and collateral damage can be staggering in comparison to generations past.
Does your child need help with math, spelling, languages or science? A major benefit to technology is the ability to search and find help from a vast array of sources. Old-fashioned tutoring has a new competitor in the form of education assistance online. The prevalence of information that can be found digitally has made learning – and teaching – a lot easier for both parents and their children.
However, there is a flip side to the ease with which information can now be found via technology, and more specifically, the Internet. Knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually retaining that knowledge in their brains. Basically, our kids are learning to remember less by knowing where information can be found.
The positive aspect of this is given the ease with which information can be found these days, not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem solving.
So what should parents take away from all this?
The bottom line is that too much screen time and not enough other activities, such as reading, playing games, and good old unstructured and imaginative play, will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.
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