Guided Response: Review and respond to two of your peers. 

Do you agree or disagree with your colleague’s conclusion(s) regarding the positive and/or negative effect(s) of technology within his or her chosen developmental periods? Whether or not you agree with your colleague’s conclusion(s), describe how your colleague’s stated advantages may actually be a disadvantage in the chosen developmental periods or vice versa. Speculate regarding relative advantages and disadvantages in another developmental period (e.g., infancy or adulthood). Suggest mediating factors for the influence(s) of technology that might have been overlooked by your colleague.

1. Hi classmates,

For your initial post, you will describe the positive and negative influences of technology on human development during childhood (ages 3-12) or adolescence (ages 13-18).

The effects of technology on development during childhood can be positive and/or negative, depending on the context and the content. We are living in a time where access to smartphones, tablets, smart TV’s, computers, etc, can be seemingly limitless and this allows for great opportunity and growth in children, and a large opportunity for negative, unwanted outcomes. With such widespread access to a plethora of information, it is important that technology access is monitored by an adult in order to ensure that content is age-appropriate. Technology brings with it a multitude of ways to access educational information that can enhance well-being and cognition. It also allows for access to harmful materials depicting violence, crimes, sex, and various other forms of explicit inappropriate material that can be extremely harmful for development and behavior outcomes.

Describes the way(s) in which technology has either positively or negatively influenced physical, cognitive, and/or psychosocial development within childhood or adolescence (e.g., the effects of media violence on aggression or educational products on learning).  

Technology can be quite an asset to childhood development, given that technology is being used and administered properly. In one study researchers created a media tool to enhance and evaluate emotional intelligence in children and the results showed that individuals who were subjected to this tool did see an increase in emotional intelligence. Along with this, researchers found that this multimedia tool was much more useful to children when paired with adult-interaction as well. A combination of media and human-interaction is the best method of administering technology to ensure a positive cognitive outcome, but this isn’t to say that technology alone isn’t beneficial. Educational content can still be beneficial to children, even when not co-viewed with another adult.

Describe factors which may mediate the effect(s) of technology within your selected stage (e.g., education, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, or family/parenting).

Studies have shown that during early childhood there are cognitive benefits of co-viewing content with parent and child, it’s also important that the content is educational. In childhood it’s imperative that there is an adult monitoring access to technology, and monitoring the content that is being accessed. Research shows that exposure to appropriate, educational content is associated with increased cognitive and academic performance. Reversely, there are poor cognitive and academic associations with exposure to media that is violent and purely for entertainment.

Violent content has been linked to behavior issues later on as well.. It’s also recommended that technology access is limited to 1-2 hours a day, although research has shown that actual time spent watching television is less important on development than the content that is being absorbed by the child. Another study revealed that there are positive associations with television viewing in low-income households, but in higher income households there are negative associations with television viewing. Based on these results, depending on the type of income in that specific household, television viewing and technology may be somewhat beneficial in moderation.

2. Hello classmates,

Technology has increased, and continues to day by day. When growing up, I remember using either the internet, or the phone, but not both at the same time. Technology and adolescences have a positive and negative effect. The positive effect could benefit the studies of the adolescences for academics, personal research and social media. However, the negatives could be such as cyber bullying, violence, and using personal information on the web for social media, for everybody to see.

An example of the media use, in relation to the self-esteem of adolescences continues to increase. In the year of 2000, there was an increase in self-esteem because of media. Rather than in the years of 1970s, to the 1990’s. By using a smartphone, for an example, technology is becoming more popular. At least 77% of teenagers in America own a smartphone, by the year of 2016, and then ranged to 73% in 2015.

The definitions of self-esteem for teenagers, and older teenagers is due to factors such as, self satisfaction, life satisfaction, and domain satisfaction. The study inside the article, represents a greater satisfaction, with the higher of the grade level. (attached as a document to this discussion). The more screen time that a teenager, has.. the higher the satisfaction level due to social media, texting, facetime and smart phones and TV watching. 

The effects of this sort of technology can benefit a teenager, but also decrease the amount of homework per week, in relation to the attention to the smart phone. On average, per week a teenager will do about 30 hours of studying, but does more time with technology (watching TV, texting, social media, applications on smart devices) this includes the amount of time reading for research. (Twenage, Martin, Campbell, 2018)

Technology continues to grow since the first smartphone that was released in 2006, which was the iPhone. Not only does smart phone provide academic, and professional references. It also provides a negative feedback with sharing too much information for public knowledge. I can see in the future that technology can provide an asset to scientific data, but also provide an unnecessary amount of false information in regards to social media websites.