How Technology Made Us Lazier and Less Productive

Technology has drastically re-shaped the way we function on an everyday basis. From communication to entertainment, health and education, innovations and new gizmos are being introduced each other day promising to make our lives more convenient, productive and hassle-free. But is it really the case?

Nicholas Carr has started this discussion back in the late 2008 with a provocative question posed in his article: "Is Google making us stupid?" Since then researchers, corporations and data scientists have been haunted with the same idea – do digital devices and innovative technologies actually improve our lives or just bring additional chaos into them?

Social Media Networks: The Necessary Evil

It's safe to say most of us can't imagine our lives today without logging-into Facebook, Twitter or other social media network a couple times a day. Obviously, social media networks have made it simpler for us to stay in touch both with our personal or business contacts, discover information, get news and more. For businesses, social networks have taken advertising on a whole new level – getting your product seen by highly targeted audience got easier than ever. You no longer need a storefront to operate a six-figure retail business and can use your fans to spread the word for you without paying for expensive advertising time on TV or radio.

On the other hand, social media also account for a huge loss in productivity. In fact, according a recent research conducted by Office Broker, the time wasted on Facebook costs the UK economy over whopping £25bn annually. As the company's CEO Chris Meredith recently commented: "These survey results really got us thinking so we decided to look at deeper Facebook usage statistics to try see how big of a problem this really is. A recent study last month said using Facebook can cause depression? Well, the cost to employers of staff wasting business hours on it might just well tip some bosses over the edge"

Talking of depression and being unhappy, social media networks are often guilty of making us feel that way. According to Ethan Kross, a researcher from the University of Michigan, the more the tested subjects used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt. In fact, the participants overall satisfaction with their life was on steady decline during the experiment.

Envy plays a massive role here too as frequent usage of social media triggers the social comparison mechanisms within us, which is further exacerbated by a general similarity of people's social networks to themselves. As we are forced to compare ourselves with like-minded peers, learning about success and achievements of others hits us much harder.

The catch here is we often join social networks to learn about how other people live and show what's been going on in our lives, yet through this process of "learning and sharing" we may start to resent both others' lives and the image of ourselves we've created and now feel obliged to maintain on social media.

"It may be that the same thing people find attractive is what they ultimately find repelling," said the psychologist Samuel Gosling, who did a research on social-media use and the motivations behind social networking and sharing.

Does Texting Make Us Dumber?

A recent study conducted at the University of Coventry in Britain uncovered some curious results after analyzing texting habits of a group of 8 to 12 year olds. Each participant was asked to write a sample text in the lab longhand. It turned out that kids, who have sent three and more texts a day scored lower on literacy tests than children who don't send any.

Yet, texting fans proved to score higher results on a measure of verbal reasoning ability—likely because the condensed language of texting requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English.

Search Engines Impact Our Memory

Another group of researchers from Columbia University decided to study how the frequent usage of search engines impacts our brain. Having any information readily available with a few quick taps actually has a negative impact on our memory and cognitive performance in general.

Betsy Sparrow has noted that when using search engines people have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. In simple words – we all know where to find the information we may need; yet we have troubles storing it up in our memory. The latter is actually crucial for our problem solving and critical thinking skills as they can only be developed when we have some factual data stored inside our heads, not our laptops.

Conclusion

So does technology makes us better or worse? The correct answer is both. Certainly, living in absolute digital isolation these days is merely impossible, yet you always have different options for optimizing your daily routine, getting "off the grid" and not getting lost in "productivity porn", which is just another form of procrastination.