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Report var addthis_config = {data_track_clickback: false, ui_click: true, services_compact: "reddit, linkedin, tumblr, pinterest, google_plusone_share, more", services_exclude: "facebook, twitter, print"} February 29, 2012 Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives Main findings: Teens, technology, and human potential in 2020 By Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie Respondents’ thoughts Hyperconnected. Always on. These terms have been invented to describe the environment created when people are linked continuously through tech devices to other humans and to global intelligence. Teens and young adults have been at the forefront of the rapid adoption of the mobile internet and the always-on lifestyle it has made possible. The most recent nationally representative surveys of the Pew Internet Project show how immersed teens and young adults are in the tech environment and how tied they are to the mobile and social sides of it. Some 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, 76% use social networking sites, and 77% have cell phones. Moreover, 96% of those ages 18-29 are internet users, 84% use social networking sites, and 97% have cell phones. Well over half of those in that age cohort have smartphones and 23% own tablet computers like iPads

Alvaro Retana, a distinguished technologist with Hewlett-Packard, expressed concerns about humans’ future ability to tackle complex challenges. “The short attention spans resulting from the quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature,” he predicted. “The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus on specific problems.”

Melissa Ashner, a student at the College of William and Mary, observed, “People report having more difficulty with sustained attention (i.e., becoming immersed in a book).

There are many areas where people simply give up at doing things themselves. For simple addition problems people will often whip out their phones to use the calculators on them. It simply requires less effort than doing it themselves.

An individual has the choice between spending hours memorizing complex equations and large amounts of information, or they could simply type their question into Google and let either some more driven individual or a computer answer their questions for them.

My proposition is that technology does not slow the mind in any way, but instead make people lose their work ethic. Therefore they appear less intelligent.

Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.

The opposite theory can be seen with Norval D. Glenn. Glenn reports on a study released in 1991 by Alwin. The study examined the correlation between variables such as television, age, and family background with scores on a vocabulary test. (Glenn 216) The test was conducted by National Opinion Research Center (NORC ) from 1974 to 1990. The 10-item vocabulary test was administered to nine of the General Social Surveys. (216) The vocabulary test was developed in 1942 by Gallup and Thorndike and since then the education-adjusted mean vocabulary scores have been in decline.

Glenn shows that the Alwin study proves a negative correlation between television and vocabulary.

For example from 1975 to1990, the percentage of adults who have read an entire book in the past week declined from 30% to 24%. (Glenn 227). A more stunning statistic is the percentage of people who did not complete an entire book in the past year doubled from 8% in 1978 to 16% in 1990. Another major fault of Fowles argument is that it ignores children and young adults. Consuming and borrowing from the public library are not activities that the majority of children and young adults engage in, yet they are the one that tend to watch television the most. (Hornik 202)

They believe that students’ habitual use of shorthand is affecting their ability to write grammatically correct sentences – a skill they need not only to write term papers but one that will serve them their entire life.

“They do not capitalize words or use punctuation anymore,” says Terry Wood, a teacher with 10 years of in-class experience

[Texting] is becoming such a problem that teachers must explain why using the shortcut language is not acceptable in the business world,