Matt Richtel's Attatched to Technology and Paying the Price

In Matt Richtel’s Attatched to Technology and Paying the Price, he uses experiences of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell to describe how technology has affected their life. He explains how Mr. Campbell gets distracted so easily, and this even made him forget an important email for 12 days; something he never would have done before. Even his wife noticed a change in his behavior. She said that it was as if he was never fully emerged in a conversation. Richtel also speaks of an experiment at Stanford where multitaskers and non-multitaskers were tested. This information is very interesting because I believe it relates to everyone in today’s society. It is as if everyone is consumed by technology everywhere we go, and the world as whole relies on technology. What is scary is thinking about what would happen if technology shut down for a day. There would be mass chaos. Everyone lives in the shoes of Mr. Campbell; they surf the internet, text, watch tv, fall asleep with their phone by their side, and wake up to do it all over again. These people are considered the multitaskers in Stanford’s experiment. Although these people are mostly young, who grew up with the technology surrounding them, there are still older people being slowly introduced and consumed by the technology. The experiment showed both ups and downs for the multitaskers, which shows the ups and downs of technology in society. I believe that the media is changing everyone and causing humans to adapt as the generations continue. Living in this environment and living in the environment 50 years ago is a whole other world. It is obvious how Richtel’s Attatched to Technology and Paying the Price and Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid are very similar. In both texts, Carr and Mr. Campbell find themselves consumed in the technology and letting it affect their lives. Both see that the technology affects them positively and negatively. It allows them to multitask and take in many different streams of information at once and process it. On the other hand, it keeps them permanently distracted and uninterested in anything not involving the technology. Both of these men are in the typical position that the rest of society is in. Although Carr does not speak too much about the upside of technology, Carr and Richtel’s essays are very similar. For example, Carr speaks of how our minds now work “like computers” even when we are not using the technology. This parallels to when Richtel speaks of how Mr. Campbell is distracted and his wife refers to him as “no longer fully in the moment.” Richtel calls this “your brain on computers.” Both believe that the computer can change your mind and personality on a constant basis, causing your brain to transform to permanently be like that.