Personal Narrative: Our World Of Electrons And Distractions

(Our World of Electrons and Distractions) Every single day, we see and notice other humans. These people are wide, narrow, short, tall, happy and sad. There are a plethora of different types of humans, but in the hand of almost any human that will cross your line of sight, is a little device that can control even the most diverse of people. The cellphone has dominated our culture, from the oldest senior to the youngest toddler, but is too much of this technology hurting us rather than aiding us? It almost seems as if the human race is growing closer to electricity and further away from humanity. As generations pass and technology becomes more immense, we lose our grips on what we once had, face to face interaction. Moreover, this lack of …show more content…
Let me remove the assumption that I am against electronics. I love electronics and I myself spend a large deal of my time looking at a computer screen. While I do not believe cellphones are evil or television will rot your brain, I do believe that our lack of the ability to focus on more than one thing effectively does not mix very well with our distracting cellphones. Robert Sylwaester and Joo-Yun Cho explain in an issue of “Educational Leadership” that “An effective attention system must be able to (1) quickly identify and focus on the most important item in a complex environment; (2) sustain attention on its focus while monitoring related information and ignoring other stimuli; (3) access memories that aren 't currently active, but that could be relevant to the current focus; and (4) shift attention quickly when important new information arrives” (71-75). Our phones are acting as attention vacuums, entirely depleting our undivided attention. Often times, we analyze our environment and pick the most important source of attention and focus on that source, but when we have portals to endless media inside of our pockets, we create a source of attention. Consequentially, we develop a habit of ignoring the people and objects in our environment because our phones have most, if not all, of our attention. Our bodies are built to ignore what we are not focused on, and if our focus is dedicated to our phone screens, we almost entirely ignore other humans and their behavior in the environment. Often times, this can make its way into the homes of our families, where the parent 's eyes are glued to the TV screen, giving partial attention to the children around them. This presents to us a perfect example of how electronics take away our humanity. When we receive an alert on our phone and feel the vibration, alerting us of a notification, we actually lose a heavy amount of our