The Attention Economy

We all experienced multi-tasking before like singing when having a shower bath. Actually, multi-tasking is not anything new or related to digital phenomenon. Even without computer, we still have multi-tasking every day. At the beginning of the lesson, Christoph asked a few questions about whether multi-tasking is inefficient or stressful. For me, I feel that multi-tasking when doing the assignment is really inefficient. But it is sad that I can’t help myself to concentrate on doing the assignment only when using the computer. I keep checking the Facebook updates frequently even though there are not much updates at all. Besides, I chat with my friends on MSN. These totally hinder my assignment progress. It really makes me feel that is so inefficient. But the fact is that I just can’t control myself to put all the attention to do the assignment only. Quite often I feel frustrated about my inefficiency as I have to spend the whole day to sit in front of the computer and do the assignment that originally can be finished in a few hours.

Games, Learning and Literacy

Compared with my friends, I did not have much experience in playing video games. This is because my parents did not like me to play video games as they thought that playing video games affects academic study. As a result, I have concept that playing video games is harmful even though I like playing them. Actually, I never think that playing video games can also be a part of learning like collaborating with other players in order to achieve a goal in online games. But there are differences between reality and virtual world; what we learnt in video or online games may not be applied in the actual world. Besides, we need to aware of what those games are promoting. I think many of those popular video games are promoting violence for example players have to kill the enemies to accomplish different missions. Of course we adults do not think that it is a problem because we can distinguish what is right or wrong. But this may have a consequence on children. Here, I am not mean that those children will kill people in the reality but I think that they will tend to be unpeaceful.