Shut Down Your Screen Week Analysis

Phones, iPods, televisions, tablets, computers. Go back about 100 years or so and you’ll be lucky to find a landline or payphone. Today, technology is a part of our everyday lives. Most say that technology distracts kids, isolates them, and crazes them into addiction. “Shut Down Your Screen Week” is a national movement, challenging families to drift away from technology for a week. However, a “screen free week” here in SLH would do nothing but take away kids’ social ties, take away great opportunities of education, and could even jeopardize their safety. Spring Lake Heights Elementary should not participate in “Shut Down Your Screen Week”.

According to Keith Hampton, author of the article “Social Media as a Community,” “There is little evidence that social media is responsible for a trend of isolation, or a loss of intimacy and social support.” The idea that technology is isolating kids is simply not true. Personally, I have experienced the accusation. My mother says, probably on a daily basis, that our generation will never know how to have a conversation with someone. However, I have conversations with my friends daily, through texts and social media. Which, I

As Nicholas Carr, author of the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” said, “If we’re distracted, we understand less, remember less, and learn less.” However, this is not the case. “When the history of our current age is written, if will say that Google has made us smarter-- both individually and collectively-- because we have ready and free access to information”(Norvig). As I mentioned before, how is it possible that Google is making us stupid if it is only giving us information that would have been previously hard to obtain? It is not logical to say that technology is making us stupid, when it is actually doing the opposite. Technology can also inspire kids to pursue other things. Kids can now aspire to be computer programmers, or engineers because of