In these chapters, Jenkins, Ito, and boyd talked about learning and literacy and commercial culture. When it comes to any topic, I find it fascinating when statistics are able to define so well what it’s really happening. The chapter stated that “according to YouTube’s statistics page, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site each minute.” Talk about information overload. I’m pretty sure that many other sites have the same amount or more information being shared through their sites. I agree completely with boyd when she says that it’s not remotely possible to be able to consume all the data that’s available for us. Statistics like this allow me to understand more why so many people spend hours and hours online jumping from one site to another. I’m guilty of it myself. Whether I’m doing work, homework, or personal research/entertainment, a day does not go by where I don’t engage with the online world.
The chapter also talked about multitasking and when I read this section, I was reminded of a comment a professor made while he was lecturing several years ago. He said that there was no such thing as multitasking. Then he said there is no way your brain is capable of doing two things effectively at the same time. For some reason, I never forgot his comment. He went off saying how bad it was to try to multitask and so on – I cannot remember any other claims he made regarding the topic. I just know he had a very negative perspective about it. Up to that point, I had always heard that multitasking was something positive; something employers look for you to be able to do. I thought employers needed you to do many things at once and loved when you wrote on your resume or said at the interview that you were skilled in multitasking. But there are actually people that think otherwise. “Commenters like Linda Stone (n.d.) argue that there is no such thing as multitasking: there is only continuous partial attention, and it’s physiologically and socially costly.” Have you ever been out with friends or worse out with family and suddenly someone grabs their phone and that’s it, you’ve lost them for a few minutes? The worse is not only that they grabbed their phone but when they claim “I’m listening… I am paying attention…” but they really aren’t. They are trying to multitask but they can’t do that effectively. They can give you partial attention but not complete attention.
Later on, Jenkins talks about the fact that this is not the first time that we experience such thing as a society. He reminds of the turn of the twentieth century, “when an exposition of mass media was impacting American life, urban areas were experiencing the introduction of electric lights, signs and billboards cluttered the landscape for the first time, millions were moving from the farm to the city, blacks were moving from the South to the North, and waves of immigrants were bringing new peoples to America.” While all these examples were massive changes and perhaps as a society we are still trying to accept these changes I have to agree with him saying that we have survived all of this. As humans we have adapted to all these changes and we’ve been able to deal and work around all these changes. Perhaps it’s true what Ito says that we have to remember that information abundance is a good thing. And social connection is a good thing as well.
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