The prevalence of digital technologies impacts the ways in which people think. Numerous digital devices, such as cell phones, provide easy distractions that adversely affect the capacity for meaningful contemplation. Overall, technologies have a negative effect on attention span and the ability for prolonged reflection.
There is a growing concern that the availability of distractions, such as the cellphone or tablet, at arm’s length makes it harder for a human being to concentrate on and contemplate something. Wayne refers to his own experience and points out that, when left without a specific task to accomplish, he often takes his cellphone to check the notifications. According to him, this propensity to distract oneself with digital devices is detrimental to meaningful reflection.
Admittedly, the problem is not caused by technology per se. As noted by Nicholas Carr human beings have always been easy to distract (qtd. in Wayne). Concentrating on any single object or thought was challenging even before the advance of digital technologies.
However, the human brain is undoubtedly capable of changing under the influence of technology, and not always for the better. This ability is called neuroplasticity and, as indicated by Wayne, may lead to improvements in some cognitive functions, such as memory, planning, or spatial navigation. Yet these effects will not always be positive. Empirical evidence demonstrates that online learning challenges the learners’ attention span and requires frequent use of “multiple-choice questions, quizzes, or other interactive elements” – i.e., well-timed distractions – to maintain the educational process (Geri et al. 103). Thus, while digital technologies may improve some cognitive function, they impede the already moderate attention span even further, thus undermining the capability for in-depth reflection.
Such multitasking might be, in itself, harmful to concentration and the ability to ruminate. Wayne mentions a neurological experiment that measured the participants’ ability to introspect while being occupied by a single task or two tasks simultaneously. Those distracted by the second task were just as good in terms of performance as their counterparts but reported worse introspection (Wayne). Thus, solving more than one task – as when checking the cellphone while doing something else – is likely to impede one’s ability to reflect on one’s activities.
While digital devices may produce this effect, it is primarily rooted in the nature of the human brain. Stephen Fleming, an English neurologist, reports that the prefrontal cortex – the region of the brain associated with introspection – “is good at doing one thing at a time” (qtd. in Wayne). Therefore, multitasking challenges the human ability to reflect on a neurological level.
One might object that the negative effects of multitasking on cognition are not that notable. Indeed, there are studies suggesting that alternating between the two tasks, as opposed to doing them simultaneously, does not impact introspection just as severely (Bratzke and Bryce 86). Still, even when the effect is modest, it is still there, and one should be aware of it when regularly distracting oneself with a cellphone.
As one can see, digital technology has an adverse impact on the human ability to ruminate. Distractions in the shape of digital devices undermine the human attention span, which is not long, to begin with, and impact the capability for introspection negatively. The fact that multitasking involved in using a phone as a distraction may not be too detrimental to introspection is a valid objection, but the negative effect still occurs, even if at a moderate rate.
Works Cited
Bratzke, D., and D. Bryce. “Introspection Is Not Always Blind to the Costs of Multitasking: The Case of Task Switching.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 45, no. 6, 2019, pp. 980–992.
Geri, Nitza, Amir Winer, and Beni Zaks. “Challenging the Six-Minute Myth of Online Video Lectures: Can Interactivity Expand the Attention Span of Learners?” Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, pp.101-111.
Wayne, T. “The End of Reflection.” The New York Times, 2016.