Millennials’ Hyperconnected Lives – Do the Benefits Outweigh the Negatives? | Teen Ink

Millennials’ Hyperconnected Lives – Do the Benefits Outweigh the Negatives?

June 9, 2012
By AspireDana BRONZE, Carlsbad, California
AspireDana BRONZE, Carlsbad, California
3 articles 0 photos 0 comments

A high school French instructor once told her class, “Stop whining! Imagine having to do the amount of research without a computer.” The class groaned and unsurprisingly, no one had a sudden revelation to go to the library and thumb through several 500-page books to complete their research papers.

The Millennial Generation and hyperconnectivity go hand-in-hand. Look on a Millennial’s computer screen, and you will often see more than seven tabs open at once. This is known as multi-tasking, and although the Millennial generation’s technology allows for efficiency and adept methods of achieving and seeking higher intelligence, there can also be baleful results such as the pitfall of being distracted and the depravity of deep engagement skills with people and knowledge.

There is no doubt that Millennials are wired differently than those above 35 years of age, but are the benefits of being hyperconnected worth its negative effects?

In, “Millennials Will Benefit and Suffer due to their Hyperconnected lives,” the Pew Research Center recently discovered that 55% of Americans believe that Millennial’s multitasking “yields helpful results” and that they “cycle quickly through personal- and work related tasks.” They also claimed that, Millennials are “adept at finding answers to deep questions, in part because they can search effectively and access collective intelligence via the internet.”

The other 42% of Americans surveyed agree that Millennial’s usage of internet causes them to “spend most of their energy sharing short social messages, being entertained, and being distracted”, thus, they “lack deep-thinking capabilities; lack face-to-face social skills; and depend in unhealthy ways on the internet.”

The collision between Millennials and the Internet Age is an issue so disputed that there is no particular lean towards one side of it – viewpoints are for the most part, split in half. However, it is best to believe that the benefits of Millennial hyperconnectivity will outweigh the negatives considering the future.

Millennials are about moving forward. There is no leeway for dwelling on the effects of human behavioral changes, but room for adaption. Millennials can multitask and their hyperconnected lives have already proven successful. I personally, had only three tabs open, each related to my research on the hyperconnectivity of Millennials. How else could I have efficiently found the necessary information to compose this report?



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