The Monsters of Multi-tasking: How Technology Consumption Consumes College Students

You sit at your desk and the professor is talking.

He’s saying something about the Revolutionary War but your smart phone is vibrating a text from your roommate about lunch plans, your iPod is pumping out the new Taylor Swift song (your new favorite), you start thinking about the music video that goes with the song and your foot starts tapping. You pull out your iPad and type a couple words, dates, names coming from your professor’s moving mouth but wait, the latest Facebook notification just announced your ex is in a new relationship followed by an explosion of Tweets reminiscing about the weekend’s drunken escapades and hookups, and how could you miss your ex hooking up with this new person? You SnapChat a series of sad faces to your roommate, crank out angry Facebook statuses just as a Metallica song materializes your angst and the professor says your assignment is due next class, see you tomorrow.

Was your brain out of breath after reading that last paragraph?

Good.

You just got a peek inside the havoc multitasking wreaks inside a college student’s mind.

It’s obvious that multitasking is integrated into society, and is most prominently found in college culture. College students are multitasking fiends, between annotating lessons from class to updating their social media, or both at the same time.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was a college student, and I can attest this is true.

In fact, as a journalism major, we were trained to be proficient in multitasking – scribbling down an interview via shorthand while also recording it, updating social media with breaking news, shooting videos and pictures for a story, and on and on.

My multitasking training worked – I’m now employed at a great publication where all these multitasking skills are needed.

However, according to a Business Insider article, multitasking is exhausting for college students, and is detrimental to producing good work.