Discussion
The texts in your exam material present and analyse issues related to the way internet and technology affect people’s brains, and as a result, their actions and performances. To help you discuss the topic of internet and technology and their impact on people’s brains, we encourage you to look at the positive and negative aspects mentioned in the exam material, and their prospective impact on the future.
Pros and cons of internet and technology
The texts in your exam material offer both arguments in favour and against internet and technology with regards to the way they influence people’s lives and minds. Texts I and II are more focused on the negative aspects of internet and technology, while texts III and IV present more positive aspects of the impact of internet and technology.
The pros of internet and technology mentioned the exam sources are:
- Some internet and mobile phone apps can help improve communication and relationships. (Text I)
- Internet and mobile technologies make it easier to communicate with people you know and to make new connections. (Texts I and III)
- Internet and technologies offer faster access to information that people might be interested in, such as discounts in nearby stores. (Text I)
- Internet and technologies promote multitasking, because people learn to divide their attention. (Texts I, II, III)
- Some gadgets like the iPad may help people refocus attention, as people tend to spend more time on a single app than flicking through the iPad. (Text II)
- The internet improves people’s abilities to search for information and to deal with abstract information. (Text III)
- The internet can improve people’s communication skills. (Text III)
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The future of information technology
Part of your assignment asks you to write a report from the future in which you describe and discuss the use and impact of this kind of information technology fifty years from now. Based on the texts in your exam set, you can come up with a few potential future scenarios.
In one scenario, suggested by Texts I, II and III, people might become increasingly overwhelmed by information technologies, and consequently lose or develop a limited capacity to focus attention, affecting their memory and complex reasoning. Also, their relationships and interactions with others will become less meaningful. This scenario is sarcastically summarised in Text III: “But is this true? Are sudoku puzzles the only thing stopping the species turning into a horde of attention-deficient, socially-dysfunctional, email addicts – part human, part smartphone?”
Another future scenario is suggested by Texts I, II, and IV. In this scenario, technology will develop to help prevent people from losing attention focus (Text II) and their socio-emotional skills (Text I).
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