Ritalin, Information, Google and things!
Recently, on my way dropping my two boys of at school, I was listening to the radio. I became faintly aware of some other distracting noise in the car. Snapping back to reality I realized it was one of my sons having a full-on conversation with me about a complete different topic than what’s been discussed on radio. It took me a moment to organize my thoughts and focus on the conversation with my son. I also noticed that while he was talking to me he was busy fiddling with his cell phone and to my surprise, after a moment of conversation, I realized that he was fully aware of what was being discussed on the radio as well. My son is 10 and to top it off the school wanted to put him on Ritalin because he had a “concentration” problem! Go figure!
At this point I recalled an article I read: “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nic Carr. The fact is Google and the rest of our IT driven lives are forcing us to take in a whole lot more information than ever before. Reading constant email messages, MSN popups, News headlines, Forum discussions, Facebook, continuous SMS messages etc. To me the ability to focus and concentrate on more than one task at a time is a crucial skill that should be encouraged and not seen as a problem only Ritalin can fix!
The point of this is not aimed at the teachers to better understand kids and their behavior today, but more around information overload and how that is shaping us, our kids and our future. Especially if you are like me – the typical “I can’t multitask” male.
According to Wikipedia the general causes of information overload include:
- A rapidly increasing rate of new information being produced
- The ease of duplication and transmission of data across the Internet
- An increase in the available channels of incoming information (e.g. telephone, e-mail, instant messaging, rss)
- Large amounts of historical information to dig through
- Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information
- A low signal-to-noise ratio
- A lack of a method for comparing and processing different kinds of information
Until evolution has shaped us into the perfect beings to deal with all this information properly, it will get more and more difficult to manage our own consumption of information – and for now the best way I know of coping is to scan over a magnitude of article headlines. There just aint enough time to read it all 
Maybe filtrbox will help, a (yet another) online service to filter online information.
Hey, you’re are still here! – good job 
– go and read this article:
Overcoming information overload
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Very interesting article, Johann! I think that the teachers are the ones that need to get with the times on how the human race is evolving, especially our younger generation. So many children are being diagnosed with ADHD, ADD and the list goes on – but as mentioned…technology is beginning to shape the new generation – the way that we communicate, our thought processes and our personalities…great read!
Amazing, all too often we take the net for granted, interesting read.
Its amazing how our kids pick up technology faster than what we could at their age.The other day my son was playing with his cellphone and took over the functions of my laptop remotely. This without anyone telling him how to do it. I agree with Tracy, our teachers have to admit that the kids could teach them a thing or two.
Some schools of thought among futurists say that cognitive ability will have less and less to do with memory and more and more to do with our ability to sift relevant information out of huge mounds of information. In addition due to the impossibility of knowing everything and the inability to tell a fact for certain it has already been noted that with the information overload that young people use less definitive language than older people. For example less “i will” “yes” and more “maybe” and “approximately”. This is often viewed as younger people being uncommitted, rather it should be viewed as an aknowledgment of the fact that none of us can or do know everything