Technology's Negative Effects On Communication

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Nowadays, almost everyone uses cell phones, social media and other innovative technologies. If they are aware of it or not, many of them rely on them or are even addicted. Children start using them earlier and earlier and people on the street look down to their cell phones not paying attention to their environment. Even if they are with friends they have to check their phone so they sit next to each other busy with their smartphones. In a university or college lecture students are busy typing on their laptops or playing and texting friends with their phones. This heavy reliance on technology is affecting our communication and learning and these technologies are not always helpful or better than traditional methods.
In our global world communication …show more content…

Therefore it is possible to stay in contact with friends ever over great distances or even make new friends. Cell phones and social media makes its users reachable and allows a quick exchange of information. The communication via texting and chatting is mostly constructed for a quick exchange and uses much shortenings. But on the other hand these innovative technologies can hinder communication. More and more unnecessary shortenings occur and lead to a cryptically, secret language where shortenings have more than one meaning. This can lead to misunderstandings. Additionally these grammar and spelling errors make their way into the everyday communication and even into professional writings for example students start to say “lol” instead of laughing or write “u” instead of “you” in their school …show more content…

The same goes for the use of innovative technology during academic work at home. Baran (2013) observed that watching TV, talking to someone on the phone or using the internet during academic work is ineffective and leads to errors; however, listening to music does not influence the results. This is explained by a research of Büchner, König, Pick, & Krumm (2006) which showed that multitasking leads to a decrease in speed and an increase in errors because only one type of activity can be processed at the same time and the ability of storing information while processing another task is low. Students continue multitasking and spending much time on their cell phones and laptops even though they are aware that this is ineffective and causes errors (Elder, 2013). Therefore, information in the lecture which is processed while multitasking for example while texting is not deeply processed and stored well. Besides the presents of cellphones and laptops that can cause distraction in class the note taking with laptops is in comparison to longhand note-taking inefficient because students tend to transcript the lecture, whereas they tend to process the information and write it down in their own voice when taking longhand notes ( Mueller & Oppenheimer,

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