Abstract

In this day and age, digital media seems to be unavoidable. According to the study of Rothman (2016), information and technological density has been exponentially rising through each generation. Most of the students nowadays are members of the generational cohort Generation Z. The Pew Research Center states that this generational cohort is the first set of people to be born in the middle of the technological revolution. These technological advances brought forth the existence of digital media. This new form of media has a lot of differences from old media. According to Lister et al. (2008), interactivity, accessibility, and consumption of digital media allowed globalization to take place forming a greater community. The Rappler's census states that 83 percent of Filipinos having social media accounts, and 84 percent of them having cellphones past the age of 12. With these factors in mind, Universal McCann hailed the Philippines as the social media capital of the world. However, the high use of digital media comes at a cost. Rothman states that the constant stream of hundreds of small bits of information from the television, and different forms of media has rewired our brains to expect all information to be sent in small, and quick packages. Dr. John Ratey from Harvard University has called this phenomenon Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder or AADD due to their inability to focus on complex information. There has been an increasing trend in the cases of AADD worldwide. Task-switching further compounds on the individual's inability to focus. This refers to the subconscious act of performing a habitual action in the middle of another task, thus slowing the rate of the initial task. The inner struggle that causes task-switching is due to the exposure to the stimulus that triggers such habitual action. According to Rossen and Carrier (2012), the most common activity that causes task-switching is the use of media-induced, such as different social media, web-browsing, internet videos, and the like. This is likely due to the widespread access to digital media that triggers these activities. However, there has not been a clear direct correlation between the use of digital media and the frequency of task-switching in our local context yet.
The studies about the correlation between the use of digital media and task-switching have only been conducted in international countries. Most studies of these studies are also performed with task-specific measurements, such as the study of Ophir (2009) and Alzahabi and Becker (2013), which used a lab controlled environment and a specific activity to measure their task-switching frequency. These specific activities usually focus on card-based activities, with one set of cards meant to be ignored, and another one meant to be reacted upon. These lab conditions are not completely representative of how task-switching is done in the real world and the correlation between the two variables is not as explored in a natural setting. Task-specific measurements do can drastically vary even if the method and variables are kept the same. This was shown by the opposite results of the studies of Ophir (2009) and Alzahabi and Becker (2013) even if they used the same method. Because of their contradicting results, there is no conclusive study about the direct correlation of the two variables yet. The study attempts to give conclusive evidence to the correlation between the use of digital media and task-switching.