User:Meini0604/smartphones' impact on attention

Smartphone's Impact on People's Attention

According to Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at University of Virginia, smartphones do not make human brain degenerate on the ability to concentrate. In other words, smartphones do not make people dumb; instead, they provide a variety of entertainments that tempts people to use it. Paying attention requires not only ability but also desire. When people have stronger desire to do something else other than working, they are distracted. Scientists performed tests over people and found out that their performance on these tests today looks a lot alike with the performance from people 50 years ago, which means that smartphones are not causing any significant change on human brain.

According to a research that was conducted by Lorraine D. Jackson from California Polytechnic State University, mobile phones were considered “mostly a distraction” by 76% of the sample. 70% of the sample thinks laptop computers, tablets, or smartphones are distracting to self while 31% of the sample thinks they are distracting to others. By looking at the result from this survey, we can see that a huge amount of students actually consider digital technology devices such as smartphones as mostly a distraction. Even though smartphones do provide a lot of help with the online searching feature they offer, the instant messaging social media apps tends to cause distractions through the notification system. Rachel Emma Silverman states in her article “Here's Why You Won't Finish this Article” that even though digital technology has led to a significant increase for productivity, the way people work today distracts individual focus. Academic studies have found about every three minutes, office workers are distracted by someone else or digital notifications. According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, once the worker is off track, it can take him around 23 minutes to get back to his original task.

Smartphones are not only distracting people when they are using it, just having it visible may distracts people according to a research in the journal Social Psychology. In the study, participants were separated into three groups to complete different motor tasks: one with the group leader’s smartphone visible, one with their own smartphones visible, the last one with no smartphones visible. Performances on complex tasks in the first two groups that have smartphones visible were not as good as the group that has no smartphones visible. This research shows us that smartphones’ presence reminds people of the broader social community they can reach on their fingertips.

Multitasking

Nowadays with the developed technology, people often do several works at one time. According to the author Paul BS Lai, only 2% of people could multitask successfully, which means the rest of 98% would have their productivity reduced without notice. The distractions coming from modern technology forces people to share some of the concentration. Notifications of social media drags people’s attention and reduce their productivity. The reason some of the people like multitasking is because it sends a wrong feeling of accomplishing more at a time, however, that is not true since the attention is separated and productivity is low while people multitask. Paul suggests the readers to monotask since it may make people to accomplish more. When people multitask they are not achieving multiple tasks at the same time, according to Paul McFerdies: “they are more like those old microprocessors that just switched from one process to another at lightning speed.” The work that gets less attention on is put to the background. In order to get rid of the attentional assaults, people need to have a digital cleanse: “the minimal use of digital technologies for a set period of time.”