In an age where everyone believes they are great multi-taskers and are able to retain large amounts of information in little to no time is the greatest fallacy of them all. Studies have shown that people who think they are great multi-taskers, who text during class while taking notes, or texting while having a face-to-face conversation were unable to repeat much of anything from both the texts they sending and the notes and/or conversation. Having the internet only made this problem worst.
In general, people on the computer have at least 2-3 tabs open while on the computer. The majority of the time the tabs are a social website, like Facebook, the persons email, and some unrelated website that they may have stumbled upon. It doesn’t get any better when students are researching something online or anyone for that matter. I am certain that we have all fallen prey to bouncing around the internet because one thing caught our eye and then when we got there something else caught our eye. And then in the end, we can’t even remember what we were even trying to search for to begin with.
Our brains are “equipped to think, to analyze, to dissect, and create.” And we are only stopping ourselves from using our brains at full capacity. If we continue to multi-task and disregard the facts that our memory short-term and long-term could eventually get worse, we are just setting ourselves up for failure. We will no longer be the critically-thinking generation we think we are because we will only be able to “simply respond to bits of stimulation” and never really ever go deep.