Technology and Social Media Shaping Our Reading

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Poor Performance
Development Skills
Loss of Creativity
Laziness
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Technology and social media have had a massive impact on the way people read in the modern society. Although several benefits can be identified, critical analysis shows that negative factors outweigh the benefits. According to Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch (87), technology and social media have completely changed the reading pattern that existed before. The stakeholders in the education sector are still not aware of the best ways through which these negative impacts can be addressed. In this paper, the focus will be to determine how technology and social media shape the way people read today.

Poor Performance

Technology and social media are directly linked to poor performance among students today. Students spend much of their time on Facebook, Tweeter, and YouTube, sparing very little time for their academic works. This has lowered the standards of learning in many institutions. Students find it easy to address their assignments online, eliminating the research work that existed before. Some students would copy-paste answers they get from the internet every time they have an assignment. As Noor and Hendrick (27) note, scanning of books, journal articles, and other literature has become very popular among the students as they do not have quality time to do their researches. Their interest is to address their assignments within the shortest time possible to create more time to spend on social media.

The existing technologies have made skimming and scanning of literature simpler than they were before. This habit among students is reducing their capacity to read and understand the concepts presented in their course materials. The overall impact is poor performance among the students. This situation explains why many firms are now complaining that many institutions of higher learning are currently producing less competent graduates with limited practical knowledge.

Development Skills

Learning institutions are meant to promote comprehensive social development among learners. However, the use of technology and social media has made it difficult to achieve this objective. Communication skills among these students are poor because people meet more often on online platforms instead of face-to-face communication. This made it difficult for learners to develop better communication ideas outside the internet.

The common use of text messages, especially the abbreviated words is affecting the communication skills of the learners. It is common to find cases where students use abbreviations popular in social media when writing their papers. Some of these abbreviations may not make sense to the examiners. Others use such abbreviations when writing official documents such as letters and resumes. Most of the employers base their decisions about the capability of the application on the letters and resumes presented to them.

When these abbreviations and slung words are commonly used, especially in cases where they do not even understand these abbreviations, then they will conclude that such an applicant cannot deliver the expected results. For instance, the word ‘talk to you later’ is commonly abbreviated as ‘TTYL’ among the users of social media (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 44). However, not everyone may know such abbreviations. Such a mistake in writing breaks-down the flow of ideas in a message, making it difficult to comprehend the intended message.

Loss of Creativity

Noor and Hendrick (51) argue that technology and social media have led to the loss of creativity among current learners. Creativity among learners depends on the amount of knowledge they gather. As students go through the existing literature, they identify literature gaps. This will motivate them to conduct further study to address the existing literature gaps. It is from such further studies that they become creative. They come to understand what previous scholars did and the weaknesses in their studies. In an attempt to address the existing literature gaps, they will avoid mistakes made by these previous scholars, making it easy to come up with new findings.

This is no longer the case due to the popularity of social media and technology among students. The internet has made it easy for these learners to address their academic problems within the shortest time possible. There are cases where a student can simply key-in the instructions given and Google will provide answers as expected by the lecturer. This means that such a learner does not have to waste time doing any research. Such students opt to use the ideas they find on the internet instead of developing critical thoughts in solving their academic problems.

Laziness

According to Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch (73), technology and social media have promoted laziness among students in modern society. Learning is generally a complex process that demands dedication, discipline, and a lot of focus. There must be an inner drive among the learners to get new information about the course or subject. Learners must develop a character of studies. However, this is not the case among the techno-savvy learners who spend most of their time online. The kind of entertainment found on the internet is so tempting that these learners find themselves with limited time for academic works.

The internet offers them a solution to creating more time for entertainment without ignoring assignments. They can easily find answers they need from online sources. Those who are concerned about plagiarism will try to paraphrase the content they find on the internet. The lazy ones will copy-paste the information from the internet without changing a single sentence. It means that an assignment that was expected to take one week can be addressed in less than thirty minutes.

To these students, the issue is to pass exams and nothing else matters to them. This laziness has seen cases where students graduate from school with almost no knowledge about what is expected of them in the real world. Solving this problem has been the major challenge that educators have to deal with in the learning institutions. It is difficult to determine if learners are doing meaningful studies when they are online or chatting with a friend on Facebook.

Conclusion

Technology and social media have reduced the time that learners take in doing meaningful academic work. Books have become unpopular among these learners because of the time they have to spend on them. They now prefer skimming and scanning whenever they are addressing their assignments. Alternatively, they can use short articles that do not have comprehensive information about the issues under investigation.

This trend must be stopped as soon as possible to improve the learning process among modern students. The stakeholders must find a way of reducing the time that learners take on social media and other irrelevant online sites. They have to understand that learning goes beyond passing exams. They must comprehend the course content by spending quality time in books.

Works Cited

Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Print.

Noor, Hana, and John Hendrick. Social Media: Usage and Impact. London: Lexington Books, 2013. Print.

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