Your Brain On Tech...

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All of the technologies we have are meant to make our lives much simpler. We can accomplish many tasks simultaneously, find information quickly, and communicate almost synchronically with a multitude of devices. This is all well and good, but did anyone consider that this could reshape how our brain operates?

There many people who claim that the advancement of technology, as much as it helps us, also makes us more dependent on it. Being dependent on a printer to print documents or that a computer turns on is not what I am getting at.  The fact that now we are so reliant on google to answer our questions, social networking sites to maintain our relationships, and our mobile devices to be in constant contact with people at all times, is changing the way our brain functions.

Take for instance how people store every email they receive, even though it is not necessary. Researchers claim that this is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. 

"Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse." -Dr. Aboujaoude

Courtesy of www.flikr.com

In the same context, when a person stores 500 photos on a site like Flikr instead of just having a few memorable, it takes away the highlights of a trip and replaces them with irrelevant candid images.

In contrast, let's take social networking sites. A person may have ,on average, 190 friends on Facebook. Of those 190 friends could that person pick every single one of those people in a crowd, I very much doubt it. I think that our reliance on Facebook to tell us who are friends are is affecting our ability to remember the the simplest social interactions we have. I know from personal experience, I have immediately added someone on Facebook just to make sure I didn't forget who they were later on.

"Oh don't worry, I'll Google it!" Everybody's favorite response to "I don't know." Yes I can attest to saying this on many occasions and I feel stupid every time. Google is making it so that our brains are tricked into changing how we remember things. Instead of actually retaining the information we sought after, our brain says, "Nah that's okay we can just look it up again another time..." There is a very good depiction of this phenomenon,  where the idea of brain plasticity is the reason for this. This concept, in a nutshell, means that our brain is constantly rewiring itself to adapt to our environment. In this case our brains are slowly reprogramming to not remember facts as well and limiting our storage capabilities.

We rely on technology to get through everyday life. It tells us where to go, what to do, and how to do it. The problem is that our brains are being tricked into limiting how much we actually need to remember day to day. This is your brain on tech.

Giles of the Online Gamer

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Many teens are subscribed to mass multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG). Some examples of MMORPGs include: World of Warcraft (WoW), Starcraft, League of Legends and countless others that can be found on online gaming sites like Kongregate. In my opinion, these games have played a crucial role in the evolution of technology addiction in the way that many of these games became a world wide phenomenon. In numerous cases teens and young adults are diagnosed with a technology addiction, because of their online game playing.

What the experts say...
Psychiatrists associate gambling as a closely related addiction to video games. The commonality between the two are the effects on the brain. Web MD,  the only source for I go to for medical advice,  claims that both gambling and gaming produce a significant amount dopamine in the brain. That is not the whole story though. Psychiatrists also say that another element of this addiction is the draw to being a dominant figure in a virtual world as opposed to the way they are in reality.

Courtesy of www.news.cnet.com

The alter ego...
The notion of an addiction to virtuality can be traced to the early years of online games like WoW. I can remember back in grade school that many of my friends had access to this game and spent hours after school playing it and often skipping homework to keep on playing. This was a time before social networking, smartphones or broadband, which in retrospect must have made gaming tough. What I am getting at is that these games were but mere stepping stones into a virtual world where people across the globe get sucked into. This Frontline video talks about a man's fight to manage his excessive gaming habits as a teenager.

#Trending...
Now more recently, I have found that subscriptions to MMORPGs has been on a steady decline. In this BBC article I learned that as of last June WoW has lost 1.1 million subscribers. Now unfortunately, this is not because people are quitting their gaming habits. It is on the contrary where the gamers are paying more attention to console-based games, so essentially the problem persists.

Sweet so where do we go from here...
Video game addiction is an avenue where technology that can benefit us by providing some sort outlet for stress or other emotions. However it has the potential to be misused or be used a escape rope from reality. As many can probably agree, video games were one of the first areas of technology to be considered addictive and from the looks of it, I feel that this is only a growing problem.

How to Be the Philip Morris of the e-World

Everyone likes a good plot twist, so let's talk about how one can find fame and fortune by creating new media that some claim is as addictive as cigarettes! The media from the top of my head that fit this category are: Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga Games. All of these different avenues have successfully built an empire on creating their own pop-culture, in which people just get sucked into. In addition, these outlets have actually teamed up to an extent and created a multi-billion dollar industry of user-generated content and a couple of online games.

First, let's talk about Facebook. You can either look at their company page or continue with my grueling synopsis. Facebook is site that allows users to update their friends with "statuses", check-in to local places, post photos and videos, and play games with friends. There is a lot more to it than that, but I'll save the pleasantries. Let's look at it this way, Facebook relies on its users to generate all of the content that is displayed on our individual "feeds". We can decide who we see and who can see us, so its a very user-based application.

According the Facebook Newsroom there are over 845 million users floating around the Internet! The profit comes from a variety of services which include: advertising, Facebook Dollars, and an assortment of applications.

Courtesy of www.img.labnol.org

Last year Facebook raked in a profit of $3.7 billion!

Twitter is not quite as elaborate as Facebook. There aren't any games or ads perse, the idea is still somewhat the same. Users create the content that is shared with everyone in the Twitterverse, this includes text posts, links, photos, etc. Twitter allows for quick little blerbs to be seen by millions of people with the right subject tag, which are indicated by a pound sign (#). Posts with similar "hashtags" are clumped together until they become trend. These trends can range from current events to people posting about life in the 90's.

Zynga games, the company that brought us the plague of Farmville. I know many people who can attest to getting completely suck into this game to point where they were willing to pay for items in the game just to get an edge. As of late, the new Zynga bane of those with smartphones include games like Words with Friends, Hanging with Friends and of a day ago Draw Something. These games can be linked with Facebook, so basically Zynga get's free marketing from those who decide to invite their friends that do not already play the game, it's genius! Of course they offer a free version to get us hooked then keep blasting ads telling us to buy the full version of the game.

To me, we have put such an investment of our lives into these sites and games that its almost sickening and what's worse is that people are making money off our lost time. I may not agree that Facebook can lead to addiction, but it's become so ingrained into our culture that not connecting to these media is stigmatized. This new area of business is only predicted to grow and there is no telling when, we are the key to their success.

Below I posted a video feature about Draw Something the newest acquisition of Zynga Games.