Clay Shriky Summary

“And while I do, who is whispering to the elephants? Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, the list goes on, abetted by the designers of the Mac iOS, Windows and Android”. A phrase Clay Shirky uses in his article “Why a leading professor of a new media just banned technology use in class” to argue that with these new sources, students tend to lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep even leading them to multi-task. These sources have every motive to capture as much attention as possible, increasing distractions and the lost of focus in class for students. Therefore, making it much more difficult for students to pay attention to class material and leading Clay Shirky’s decision of allowing technology …show more content…
Having said that, multi-taskers are convinced that by accomplishing two or more things at a time, they are using time more effectively. Clay Shriky’s disagrees and clarifies, “…It can have negative long-term effects on declarative memory”. Regardless of how students find multitasking an advantage, when their brain is switching thoughts back and forth between tasks, it affects the long-term memory before changing to another task. Clay argues that multi-tasking is not even considered task switching as a skill proving that factors switching between task values more time because information is being processed much slower. Through this, multi-tasking actually worsens what the students want to improve, which is shown as a fact in Clay’s research from A study from Stanford. Furthermore, while multi-tasking interferes with the information students learn, social media is progressively …show more content…
Clay states “…Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers says it all: …the results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students…” this conveys that students who multitask in class not only distracts themselves but those around them. Having said that, students don’t only lose out on the materials mentioned in class, in worst scenarios they create a distraction for their peers. In surroundings like this, student notes are less accurate resulting them to score less on tests and assignments. Clay argues that environments like this happen because of social structures and in order to change or decrease this, the professors have to test out their level of how interesting they are to help those who actually want to focus and learn. While this is a change for the students to consider their ability to focus, professors as well are switching their role to demolish second-hand distraction for the other