The Importance Of Digital Technology

America as a whole is very technologically advanced. My generation in particular is known for being the first generation to grow up with digital technology, and being very technologically dependent. Logging my technology, and going a day without it, was something I absolutely dreaded doing. Growing up with frequent complaints from my parents of being on my phone too much, I knew this was going to be a challenge for me. I knew I used technology a lot, but I found the results from the data I collected were very surprising. My day to day life consists of a large variety of technology usage, from drones to phones, it is very rare that I’m not using something digital. Through this study I found that out of all my digital technology devices, my

Through this study I discovered my laptop is my second most used technological device; I used it 10 times out of the 112 times I used technology. The reason I do not use my laptop as much as I use my phone is that my phone is significantly more convenient and does almost everything a computer can. I usually only use my laptop for purposes that are exclusive to a computer- such as taking a test on Blackboard or editing a video in Adobe Premiere Pro. According to the PEW Report by Monica Anderson, computer ownership among young adults in America is actually declining. She attributes this to the fact that a lot of young adults “don’t feel as much of a need” as older generations do to “have other kinds of devices” (Anderson, 2015, pg.1) because they feel their phones combine the features of other devices such as televisions and computers. I currently do not use my computer very often because I do not have a large amount of computer only tasks to accomplish. Once I transition into the Radio-Television-Film major I envision my computer usage to notably increase as a large amount my school work will have to be completed on a computer due to video and audio

Through this study I found that I used my technology for mostly leisurely purposes. Out of the 112 times I used technology during this study, I used it for leisurely purposes 89 times which amounts to 80% of my total technology use. In this study I defined leisurely purposes as any time my technology was used for non-educational communication as well as any time a non-educational application was used such as social media. Social media seems to be an epidemic in today’s society, as the PEW report by Amanda Lenhart reported, “92% of teenagers say they use social media daily, and 24% of teenagers describe their social media usage as almost constantly” (Lenhart, 2015, p.1). According to my study, Twitter and Instagram are my most frequently used social medias, spending an average of 1.94 minutes on Twitter and 2.06 minutes on Instagram every time I opened the applications. I recorded spending a total of 136 minutes on social media through my two days of technology logging, which is actually far below the national average according to a study published in a CNN article. The report in the CNN article, which was written by Common Sense Media, states that “teenagers spend an average of 9 hours a day on social media” (Wallace, 2015, pg.1). My logs report that I spend a little