Yesterday, we did an experiment on “wasting time on the Internet.” I was really really excited about this when I came into class.  At first, it was exactly like I thought it would be. I spent a lot of time on Buzzfeed and Facebook, like I would normally. Then I saw the shiny chatroom. Now I liked the idea of the chatroom. It is much easier to use than the other mediums that I ended up using later. The problem was that it did not always work very well. I came in a tad bit late to the chatroom and it was hard for me to keep up. It would not really let anyone keep up with any earlier conversations, but kept directing everyone to the bottom. It put on a certain pressure to keep up with the conversation. While I was doing this, I was also trying to keep up with the email conversation. Afterward, thought a lot about Hayle’s definition of hyper-tension as “characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of simulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.” I was definitely highly stimulated and my focus was definitely shifting rapidly. It was actually rather exhausting. After class had ended, my brain felt very much like it does after an intense round of studying. I felt like I had been concentrating very hard for  a very long time. I imagined that is what having ADD/ADHD must be like. I was part of a very interesting conversation in the email group that essentially proved me wrong. The people that have ADD/ADHD in the class were also having issues with the assignment. This was because of the difference between this excercise and traditional classroom methods. One person said it was exhausting because it seemed to “cater to ADD.”  Apparently they could not seem to keep up either and it was draining. It was amazing how quickly the class seemed to go during this experiment. The more I seemed to focus on the more lost I became. It was almost like I had been sucked into something I had very little control over. But as we talked about in the chatroom, we do have the power over the distractions of technology. We can, like in this blog, turn off those distractions. It takes a ton of willpower but we can do it.