The following stress release, or rant if you prefer, is meant to relieve the stress I am feeling over completing my Twitterive assignment for Writing Research and Technology.
In the first few weeks of the semester I looked forward to the weeks that would be focused on the Twitterive since I was finding the reading based blog posts to be so cumbersome. I had no idea what I was in for.
I call myself partially creative. Only partially because I love writing creative stories and I can be quite good at it, but I need guidelines. Tell me to write a story about the book we just read from a different character's point of view. I'm right there. You would like a poem based on my tweets? No problem. You want me to create a personal essay on why I write? When can I start?! But now you want me to decide on a place (any place, even a feeling) and create a "Twitterive" (what the hell is that) with a prologue and multiple genres as the only guidlines?? You lost me.
Whose idea was this? What am I basing my place on? When should I a have a SPECIFIED number of genres? Where do I start?  Why can't you pick the genres for me? HOW DO I DO THIS?!
How's that for 5 W's and 1 H?
The ironic thing is that this is just the sort of challenge that I wanted to be able to "grow as a writer." Every good writer has faced challenges at some point right? Be careful what you wish for. Now I've got this 5,000 pound burden attached to this Twitterive: If I don't do well, I'm a bad writer. I realize no one told me to put that much stock into this project, but there's no going back now. However, I am open to an intervention. I spend much more time worrying about the Twitterive than I do working on it. I do have other classes and assignments due this semester, believe it or not.
The good news is, I've finally gotten to the point where I can semi-productively think about my Twitterive without having stomach cramps. Can you call that growth? I don't know. All I know is that this better turn out to be one heck of a Twitterive, or it might take me years to recover.

Yes and no.

Yes because people use it at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways. You could argue that this is not caused by technology and it is people who are distracting or easily distracted, but to that I say technology is by nature distracting. Social networking and video-sharing sites, games, television shows and movies are made available on electronic devices and are designed to draw the attention of the user so that they will spend long periods of time using them. Since it has become so easy to communicate with large numbers of people at once, people tend to feel that they are out of the loop when they are engaged in a single activity with only a few individuals. I cannot count how many times I've picked up my phone to look at the time only to spend several minutes looking at Facebook status updates.

No because when used appropriately technology can be used to complete productive tasks in an efficient way. Papers, for example, take much less time than they did when they had to be handwritten or typed on a typewriter. Research can be done from anywhere and is not limited by library hours. Also, easy exposure to more people from more places can be a very enriching experience. Personal and business communications that used to take hours or days can now be completed in a matter of seconds. Many tasks can be accomplished at once. I have been able to take several classes online which would have otherwise conflicted with my schedule.

I believe that the pros outweigh the cons, but I also believe that the more efficient technology becomes, the more potential there will be for distractions.