Media Multitasking

 

We currently live in a society where we are more technologically savvy than ever before. Each season there appears to be some new application, phone, or computer.  Media developers have become rich off of the world’s media consumption and subscriptions.  People of all ages have the ability to utilize multiple technology items, often at the same time.  There has been a recent study to determine if Media multitasking benefits us in any way. Media multitasking would be known as using more than one type of media or technology at the same time.The new study of 63 people aged 19 to 28, found that those who multitask frequently appear to be better at integrating information from multiple senses such as vision and hearing when asked to perform a specific task. This research highlights the fact that media multitasking require us to use various brain functions at the same time, which could help us in our daily tasks.As you can imagine, there is definitely a downside to media multitasking. The most obvious one could be lack of attention to other things going on around the person. When many people media multitask, they are oblivious to other people speaking with them or other potential distractions.The potential negative mental aspects of media multitasking  can be especially common in young people and may in include such activities as instant messaging, music, Web surfing, emailing, online videos, computer games or social networking, web cam activity, and many other things simultaneously. The dangers arise when young people do these activities while doing things such as driving, walking or things of that nature. In addition to the dangers behind media multitasking, previous research has shown that media multitasking tends to have deficits in certain areas of mental function, such as task switching, selective attention and working memory. This may be because multitaskers pay attention to multiple sources of information instead of focusing on information relevant to the task at hand. I have also known people who have become antisocial due to media multitasking. The individual would no longer have casual everyday conversations with people face to face, all communication would be virtual.”Although the present findings do not demonstrate any causal effect, they highlight an interesting possibility of the effect of media multitasking on certain cognitive abilities, multisensory integration in particular,” researchers Kelvin Lui and Alan Wong, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a journal news release. “Media multitasking may not always be a bad thing.” I agree with this statement  however, I feel that if someone were to partake in media multitasking, they should be mature enough to know how to balance all activities and they should be aware of the potential harm that could be involved.

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