Today, the digital world has expanded tremendously to include a broad range of uses and applications, varying from daily entertainment to scholarly research. Because of this, computers, tablets, and phones are indispensable tools, for both professional and personal use. Such a connection leads to either positive and negative consequences for people. On the one hand, the digital world is important for work-related or education-related communication, offering the opportunity to access vast data that can be used to reach one’s learning or career goals. Moreover, it may act as a positive distraction, allowing to ‘unwind’ and shield oneself from the troubles of the world. On the other hand, too much digital exposure and the constant connection can have a negative emotional impact on people as they waste time and energy on relatively random and unimportant information that offers no value. The topic of digital media being used as a distraction is appealing to study because technologies have become crucial parts of everyday life, and their impact is only expected to grow further.
Exploring Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier
Being human in the twenty-first-century digital world means using technologies on an everyday basis. The globe is currently consumed by technologies and the influence of constant connectivity can take a toll on the future generations. The Frontline documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier explored how the digital world is being used not only as a distraction but also as a way of living a completely different life compared to those that people experience in reality. For example, there are reports of parents being amazed of what their children do online, such as posting risqué photos, thus showing that the digital world can take different forms. Dretzin and Rushkoff, who took the role of commentators and researchers in the documentary, interviewed digitally-savvy individuals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who do not know the world in which they were not connected 24/7 (Dretzin & Rushkoff, 2010). The interviewees revealed that their extensive use of digital media resulted in them having increasingly limited attention spans, thus making it difficult for them to focus on the information and knowledge acquisition.
For instance, university students reported that they could not sit straight for several hours and focus on the same thing. They connected their limited attention span to the increased reliance on technologies and escaping into the digital world, saying that they would never be able to go back and regain their concentration. These reports were supported by the observations of teachers who said that while they taught the most brilliant students in the world, there was a significant challenge of digital technologies being a distraction during class. The teachers said that young people had done themselves a disservice by adhering to the thought that a multitasking learning environment would be the best for their multi-dimensional development. There are some areas of learning, which are highly specific, cannot be acquired to the desired extent when they are being learned in conjunction with many other things.
Therefore, there is a challenge of finding a balance between using technologies to the advantage in learning and them being distracting to the process of knowledge acquisition. In the PBS documentary, the researchers revealed that multitaskers that frequently engage with the digital world are bad at the majority of multitasking processes because of the frequent exposure to various distractions. The memory of such learners lacks organization while their analytic reasoning is on a low level. For educators, this issue creates a sense of worry that multitasking may lead to the creation of students who are unable to think well and clearly. Nevertheless, despite the adverse impact of digital technologies on learning success due to distractions, the supporters of such technologies stated that it was crucial for educators to keep their students engaged by using the most advanced tools. Since students are accustomed to sitting in front of a screen over long periods of time, the educational process needs to be interactive to keep them involved and capture their attention. In many ways, teachers are becoming entertainers because multitasking takes the majority of students’ attention: they have several windows up on their laptops and text several people at the same time.
Therefore, the Frontline documentary on digital media use showed that both younger and more mature people have become deeply immersed in popular sites through having profound experiences via their online aliases. The real effects of the high levels of virtual immersion are currently being studied by researchers. For instance, Jeremy Bailenson from the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University reported that the digital world felt real to its users, with the brain response also signaling that online was the reality. The scholar has done research with children who were exposed to virtual reality in the form of 3D visualization of swimming (Dretzin & Rushkoff, 2010). Around a half of the children population believed that they were in a physical world and were actually swimming with the fish and whales (Dretzin & Rushkoff, 2010). Therefore, the line between what is real and what is fake is blurring due to the great exposure to the digital media, posing significant challenges not only to the process of learning but also to people’s everyday lives.
Current Research on Digital Media as a Distraction
The PBS documentary on digital media as a distraction has been shot ten years ago, and there are many other current studies on the topic. As related to the learning process, Kay, Benzimra, and Li (2017) studied the factors influencing technology-based distractions in devices that students bring to classrooms. Provided by researchers from University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada, the source is relevant for shedding the light on how technologies have integrated into the daily lives of students, and class lessons are no exception. The scholars involved 188 secondary school students in their study and obtained results from self-reported data (Kay et al., 2017). It was revealed that participants engaged in at least one of five of distracting digital device activities, including writing emails, surfing the Internet, using social media, instant messaging, and playing games (Kay et al., 2017). While students were not distracted when their peers used digital devices, they were more distracted by their own use of them. Although digital technologies have significant potential to help students improve their learning, they offer readily available opportunities for entertainment and distraction.
In their Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences article, Attia et al. (2017) studied the potential influence of technology and distractions on the levels of concentration exhibited by undergraduate students. The researchers from King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences suggested that laptops’ and mobile phones’ invasion into the classroom raised significant concerns about the decreasing attention of students in the classroom. By involving 256 students between ages of 17 and 23, the researchers used a self-administered questionnaire as a data collection method. The self-reported data is important for revealing students’ true experiences with technology use in the classroom, which contributed to the credibility and accuracy of the study. The participants revealed that both laptop and cell phone use affected the concentration and the capacity to acquire information in the classroom setting, especially when combined with other disruptive behaviors such as talking.
Another study that explored the distracting effect of digital media in the classroom was carried out by Purvis, Rodger, and Beckingham (2016) from Sheffield Hallam University. By conducting a review of literature, the researchers explored the reports how social media embeds into the process of learning and whether it is disruptive or engaging. On the one hand, social media allows tutor-initiated activities, such as group projects, occur efficiently because students can quickly communicate with one another. On the other hand, frequent social media use has shown to absorb valuable time that could have been used by students to be productive. Therefore, the researchers concluded that social media websites could be seen as positive and negative tools within the educational setting. While they can pull away students from true engagement in the learning process, they are essential for young people’s networking in the professional learning context.
While digital media has shown to be a distraction to students in the process of learning, it is also important to look at the topic from a different angle. Scholars have investigated the impact of technologies on helping people distract themselves from problems and improve their psychological functioning. For example, von der Heiden et al. (2019) from the Johannes Gutenberg University aimed to determine whether excessive video gaming could adversely impact psychological functioning. However, based on self-reported data from 2,734 participants, a “medium-sized negative correlation between problematic video games play and psychological functioning,” such as self-esteem, coping, and affectivity, was found (von der Heiden et al., 2019, p. 1). An important finding was that the participants reported playing video games for distraction-motivated purposes, as a way to relax and rest. On the downside, digital media can distract people from real-world issues because of the desensitization to the state of modern society. As reported by Beadling (2019) in The Medium article, online users often get into arguments with one another about different topics or try to laugh about important issues, which allows people to gain control. However, because of the vast data available online, people often skip vital issues and focus on insignificant problems as a way to distract themselves.
Conclusion
To conclude, digital media are here to stay, and the technological progress is expected to drive more people online. In the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, more students have been learning online while more people started playing video games due to social distancing restrictions that require them being isolated at home. While it was found that digital media are overall distracting to the process of learning, their use is inevitable because of the benefits they offer, ranging from wide access to data to socialization opportunities. It is important to note that the digital world offers a distraction in a positive sense also, such as playing video games as a way to unwind and not get constantly exposed to world issues.
References
Attia, N. A., Baig, L., Marzouk, Y. I., & Khan, A. (2017). The potential effect of technology and distractions on undergraduate students’ concentration. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, 33(4), 860-865.
Beadling, R. (2019). Is social media really a distraction from real world issues?
Dretzin, R., & Rushkoff, D. (2010). Digital nation [Film]. PBS.
Kay, R., Benzimra, D., & Li, J. (2017). Exploring factors that influence technology-based distractions in bring your own device classrooms. Journal of Educational Computing, 0(0), 1-22.
Purvis, A., Rodger, H., & Beckingham, S. (2016). Engagement or distraction: The use of social media for learning in higher education. Student Engagement and Experience Journal, 5(1), 1-5.
von der Heiden, J., Braun, B., Müller, K., & Egloff, B. (2019). The association between video gaming and psychological functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. Web.