Introduction:
Introduction and Background to the Research
The topic our group chose was the influence of technology among youth, specifically among adolescents. This was a topic that really related to our group, since all of us very frequently use our devices (more specifically our beloved personal computers) in our daily lives for gaming, streaming, Facebook, and many other tasks. Of …show more content…
Both experiments followed pretty much the exact same guidelines as our experiment will: no technology usage for a specific amount of time, if you can’t do so, you fail the challenge. From the results of people doing these challenges we were already able to see the pros and cons of the disconnect, yet in much smaller amounts of time (1-3 days). The subjects of the 24 Hours: Unplugged challenge showed signs of withdrawal, such as fidgeting and distress, and the subjects of the Tech Timeout Challenge were showing similar signs of withdrawal, yet some subjects were able to discover more creative things to do with their time. Our group believes we’d have similar outcomes, yet more damaging to us since our duration is more than double these challenges (7 days). Of course, we also looked at articles about certain impacts of technology on youth such as: 3 “Is modern technology creating a culture of distraction?” by Matthew Ingram, and 4 “Digital Distractions in the Classroom: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related Purposes” by Bernard McCoy. From these articles, we see that there are certainly negative sides to being hooked on to technology such as: being distracted from other joys of life and losing productive time, which our group doesn’t fully …show more content…
We also had to consider that while technology is used by almost everyone in their daily lives, its uses and applications for individuals differs as well. With this in mind, we decided to take matters into our own hands and use ourselves as the test subjects. We’ve decided as a group to abstain from using technology for an entire week (7 days, which includes a weekend) and record, like in our control week, how many hours we’ve slept, how many meals we’ve eaten, the amount of time we spend communicating with people in person, any notable productive tasks we completed, our general mental and emotional state, and our relative amount of stress. We’re going to collect qualitative data and record our own experience not only on our charts identical to the one’s in our control week, but also record video logs of each day describing what we did and how the week is progressing so that we can compile them into a video for our final presentation to show our transition through the week. Overall, our only research tools are the articles we read