Social Networking and Staffing

Editor's Notes

1. My own journey with Mxit started in April 2006. I was visiting my mother and little sister on my annual pilgrimage to my hometown, Uitenhage. If you never heard of Uitenhage, it's where they manufacture Vws – and I don't drive one. Anyway during the week I was there I observed how my sister was spending practically all her time with her cellphone. She ate with it, she studied with it, she slept with it. When she went to bed at night she would take her phone with her, politely say goodnight, switch off her bedroom light and continue chatting under the dovet covers. This kind of behavior caused her to loose a lot of sleep and so she was always tired the next morning. The second thing she did was to have her cellphone next to her when studying. So that every 5 minutes or so she would glance over, check it, or send a message. It turns out there is a flaw in multitaksing in this way. In 2001 CNN reported on research by Ruebenstein and Meyer that shows you loose between 20% and 40% of your potential productivity when you switch between complex tasks. The result for my sister was her marks dropped from June to September and again from September the Matric final exams. On 27 December she called me crying because she had failed one subject on HG. She's since received provisional exemption and is doing her 1 st year BA. Research: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/08/05/multitasking.study/