The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

  Sometimes the tone was reproving, other times giddy with wonder. “They’ll use the library of course,” I’d reply smugly. Privately, though, I was worried. True, the miasma of multitasking through which the kids had been wading in recent years was hardly what you’d call optimal work conditions. Eliot’s phrase “distracted from distraction by distraction” springs to mind. On the other hand, most of the time it did keep them at their desks with a homework window or two theoretically open. Some sort of assignment was generally under construction. And somehow or other it eventually got handed in. I very rarely policed anyone, and I’d certainly never been one of those parents who pitches in eagerly on “our” project on the vanishing dugong or the role of women at Botany Bay.

  I didn’t think then, and I still don’t, that my kids’ homework is really my business. Maybe it’s a single parent thing, or maybe it’s a writer thing, or maybe it’s just a neglect thing. But whatever it is, it’s worked—more or less—for us. (I’ve since found out ours is hardly an isolated case. The evidence shows that teens whose parents help them with homework are actually less successful in school, after all other variables have been controlled, according to a study of “Adolescents’ Experience Doing Homework” published in 2008.15)

  In point of fact, there’s not much evidence that homework is worth doing at all—by anybody. A recent study by University of Auckland researcher Professor John Hattie analyzed the effectiveness of 113 different teaching strategies. Homework straggled in at eighty-eighth. Hattie maintains he found “zero evidence” that homework helped to improve time-management skills, or indeed any other. He also observed that in the case of long-term projects, “All you’re measuring is the parents’ skills.”16 Vindication! In fact, a morbidly obese body of research has been showing pretty much the same thing for a long time. Homework makes no difference to primary-school kids at all; it helps bright children more than the less able; and busyworkstyle worksheets are functionally meaningless.17

  I reminded inquirers I hadn’t banned anyone from using computers, only from using them in our home. “Yeah, well, home is where you’re supposed to do it,” Sussy muttered. “Hello? That’s why they call it homework.” Be that as it may, as the weeks progressed each child worked out his or her own modus operandi.

  Anni was the only one who approached the challenge with zest. She was actually looking forward to working on assignments at the college library. “I’m hoping it’ll make me more organized,” she told me as she searched for the car keys in her underwear drawer. A talented student, she’d fallen into the nasty habit of relying on her writing gifts to cover a multitude of rhetorical sins (she must have gotten that from her father) and habitually crossed her deadlines by a pug’s nose. Like Proust, she wrote in bed and always had, ever since she’d gotten her first laptop in Year 8. Unlike Proust, she was also prone to spend entire evenings pimping her Facebook photos in there.

  “It’ll be good to come home and know I can’t do any work, even if want to,” she added. Although the separation of work from leisure was something I was looking forward to as well, I noted Anni’s use of the word “can’t” with foreboding. Whereas I struggled womanfully to regain my mastery of paper and pen—and failed—the Digital Natives didn’t even go there. With the exception of Bill’s and Sussy’s math homework, it was as if they’d agreed that the whole concept of offscreen study was too outlandish even to try. I started to understand the point myself the day we went to uni to enroll Anni in her second-year courses and were told to go home and do it online.

  “We can’t do it online at home,” I began, testily. I could sense Anni tensing up beside me. Maybe it was the fingernails drawing blood from my forearm. “And even if we could, why should we? We are here, in person and waving a checkbook. We don’t need to be online . . .” Anni pulled me away, giving an apologetic shrug to the woman behind the counter, as if to say, “Birth trauma. There’s nothing we can do, really.” We had no alternative but to head to the library, on the other side of campus, and use one of the public computers there. LOL when it turned out they were all offline, and we were told once again to go home and try again.

  Bill shuddered at the mere mention of the “L” word. “But your school has an amazing library!” I enthused. “Full of books and, and shelves and ...”

  “No way!” he cried, putting his hands before him fearfully as if fending off a rabid bat. He managed to do what he had to do at friends’ houses, efficiently and without fuss, usually on the Sunday night before an assignment was due. I never asked to see his work, and he never volunteered to show it to me. But his school report at the end of semester two—a week or so after The Experiment concluded—corroborated my impression that he had continued to work at school to his usual dependable level, my doubts about what the lad was actually learning there (if anything) notwithstanding. “An A in English? What’s that about?” jeered Sussy, reading over my shoulder.

  “Stuffed if I know,” came the answer.

  But the truth was, Bill had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird. There’d been sightings. In fact, the boy who since Year 4 had subsisted on a literary diet of Mad magazines and the backs of cereal boxes—reading one book (the latest Harry Potter) every two years, whether he needed to or not—was reading more or less constantly. By the middle of month two, his “dry” time—the time not afloat in the water-polo pool—was divided between saxophone, listening to jazz, and ripping through novels like a buzzsaw.

  Over the summer holidays, sheer boredom had driven our hero to a full-scale Rowling retrospective, reading all seven books swiftly and in sequence. When he put down Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he looked as though he’d lost his best friend. “I finished,” he announced listlessly, as he opened the fridge door for a ritual check, just in case some junk food had spontaneously generated in the last forty-five minutes. For the next couple of days, I waited almost breathlessly to see what would happen. Would he start all over again with The Philosopher’s Stone and just keep cycling through for the next six months, stuck in a kind of Harry Potter purgatory? His friend came to the rescue with another series—something about wolves, or brothers, or maybe both. “Any good?” I ventured to ask as he neared the end of the fourth book. He shrugged. “I’m pretty sure I read them in Year Six, but yeah ...”

  I ended up tossing him the Haruki Murakami book a few weeks later. Kafka on the Shore is structurally complex, intellectually demanding, and vaguely spiritual, in a Tarantino-meets-the-Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters kind of way. It was an improbable read for a fifteen-year-old with a literary underbite. On the other hand, it was Japanese—like Pokémon and Naruto and so many other of Bill’s pop-culture fixations. And it was, as of course I was soon reminded, full of jazz references. The next day, I asked him how it was going. “Good,” he answered. “Weird.”

  “Promising,” I thought to myself. That was sometime in early March.

  Two months later, by Bill’s sixteenth birthday in mid-May, he had stroked his way effortlessly across half of Murakami’s considerable oeuvre. To celebrate, I bought him the complete works, or as complete as Perth’s bookstores would permit. Even now, I have a hard time getting my head around that. For my son’s sixteenth birthday, I bought him eleven books and he was thrilled.

  According to a 2009 survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, 83 percent of U.S. teens believe technology helps them with schoolwork and learning—and only 23 percent reported that their parents restricted their use of technology.18 Yet research shows the impact of media on our children’s reading habits to be somewhere between negative and apocalyptic. News travels slowly, I guess.

  But there are complications—and one of them is that our high-tech kids are not necessarily reading less, exactly. Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic in 2008 on the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and more recently in The Shallows (menacingly subtitled “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”), points out that all our frantic Web browsing and text messaging probably means we are r
eading more today than a generation ago, when television was the alpha medium. Today, however, “It’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of self”—as any parent who’s ever sneaked a peek at her teenager’s Instant Message conversation would agree.19 (“Meh . . . WTF?! . . . Soz! . . . Bahhaha-hahahahahaha!”) And one of the major differences is to do with depth, or the lack thereof.

  Reading in the age of the Internet is skim-deep. It stays on the surface, which is why they call it “surfing.” I prefer the more up-to-date term: “WILFing.” Shorthand for “What Was I Looking For?” WILFing refers to the habit of online free association that starts out with a specific purpose and ends up hours later ... well, let’s just say “elsewhere.” It’s not just kids who are afflicted by WILFing. Grown-ups are also at risk, even writerly types such as Nicholas Carr. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” he observes. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose . . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do . . . Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”20

  Maybe it’s an occupational hazard to which journalists are particularly prone. I had certainly noticed the same symptoms myself over the past couple of years. What Harold Bloom has called the “difficult pleasure” of reading at full length—and in full depth—was becoming a rarity. Literally, I felt I was forgetting how.

  I’d always had problems with long-term relationships. But come on. A novel? I couldn’t commit to reading a whole novel? I’d put it down to hormones—those ever-obliging scapegoats—or maybe adult-onset ADHD.

  And then The Experiment came along and forced me to take a closer look. And what I found was a very unpleasant family resemblance. Basically, I had developed exactly the same bad habits I criticized constantly in the kids—a sort of cognitive antsy-ness that took the form of boing-boing-boinging my way through a hundred sources and never settling down to digest any one of them. It seemed the menopause was not the message.

  When I started working from an office again, as I did in mid-March, I had a desktop computer and regular Internet access for the first time since we’d pulled the plug. Being able to take notes on a keyboard felt illicit, and amazing. To write the story of Our Disconnect, I’d already collected hundreds of articles and studies and dozens of actual books with actual covers—and all of them would need to go into the hopper. I couldn’t wait to get started. Appropriately, one of the first cabs off the rank was Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson.

  Although initially put off by Jackson’s gloom—the subtitle captures the subclinically depressed feel of the thing—before long I was hooked. True, there weren’t many laughs, or even much subtlety. (Prophecies of Armageddon are a bit like that.) But the book was so superbly researched, so scarily alive with statistics, examples, and anecdotes, that I found myself swept up in its argument almost against my will.

  And yet . . . and yet.

  At the same time as I was devouring Distracted, I found my attention wandering badly. I started in just doing my job: Googling various studies cited in the book. (Some didn’t turn up on Google, so I used Factiva and ProQuest 5000 instead. Bingo!) Then I Googled Jackson herself. (“Ah, so she’s the one who used to write that Balancing Acts column in The Globe!”) Then I Google-imaged her. (“Nice hair. Wonder how old her kids are . . .”) She mentioned Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus—I Google-imaged that too, ending up in a labyrinth of fascinating museum sites.

  Several hours later, I found myself on Amazon.com, ordering a book called Why He Didn’t Call You Back: 1,000 Guys Reveal What They Really Thought About You After Your Date. And that’s when I came to. I snapped off the computer and reached for a stack of index cards—I obviously couldn’t be trusted with a keyboard yet—and found my place in the book. “Nearly 45 percent of workplace interruptions are ‘self-initiated,’”Iread. Tell me about it.

  Jackson argues—and I am clearly in no position to demur—that the informational acid rain falling everywhere in our culture, our own family rooms very much included, is eroding what she calls “the three pillars of attention”: focus, judgment, and awareness.21 We are captives of information—in the words of Walter Ong—dangerously adrift in an information chaos that means nothing and takes us nowhere. (See, I told you it wasn’t fun.) But the worst part of all is: We think we’re doing great. We think we’re smarter and faster and more wised-up than any previous generation. Hey, it says so on Wikipedia!

  Our children are supremely confident users of new media. (Their generation seems to think they invented the Internet, which is completely LOLworthy, when you stop to think about it.) My own kids are downright smug about their cyber-superiority, rolling their eyes at my leaden-fingered mouse technique, or making impatient grabs for the keyboard to show me shortcuts. Lord knows, they are right, too. Some of the time. When it comes to Web 2.0 mastery—social media, file-sharing, creating user-generated content, and the like—they are all over me like a bad case of acne. But for good ol’, boring ol’ info-crunching, there’s nobody like a Digital Immigrant to show you a good time. All that onscreen “homework” they’re doing, all that “I need the Internet for research, Mum!” notwithstanding. When it comes to actually learning anything online, it turns out the Natives really are revolting.

  Study after study shows today’s students “display a particularly narrow field of vision” when doing Internet research. They use “quick and dirty” ways of searching, “often opt for convenience over quality,” and give up easily.22 Pretty much the way they clean their bedrooms, in other words. Research shows that Generation M are more confident information processors than their elders. Their competence is another matter. A 2008 study of “adolescent Internet literacies” published by the International Association of School Librarianship observed kids using the Internet while they did homework and concluded that most needed a crash course in remedial Googling.

  “Despite their extensive use of the Internet,” the researchers found, “students lacked skills in many areas but particularly in locating information and critical evaluation of Internet sources.”23 The teens they studied universally began their searches with Google, “entering a very few keywords with no search markers.” Of course, Wikipedia was usually the first site to appear. Students were aware that some sites were less reliable than others, but were unable to find a way around this. Most kids also believed that they knew more about the Internet than their teachers did and therefore felt resistant to instruction when it was forthcoming. Which it often wasn’t—because teachers themselves had varying abilities. Parents only added to the confusion, researchers found. Many were fixated on the (highly exaggerated) risk of Internet predators. Others, obscurely, saw books and online content as opposing armies. They seemed convinced that education was about books “winning.”

  Overall—and this is both amusing and disturbing—the researchers found that none of the stakeholders—neither parents, teachers, nor kids—was particularly tech-savvy. They all had misconceptions, knowledge gaps, and skill shortages that made the late senator Ted “The Internet Is a Series of Tubes” Stevensc seem like an oracle.

  Other research has found that teens enjoy their homework more when it is a “secondary activity” and socializing is the “primary activity.” Astonishing, no? Equally duh-worthy is the finding that kids nevertheless do a better job when homework is the only thing they focus on. Their “affect” may be more “negative”—they may be pissed off, in other words—but their achievement levels couldn’t be happier. 24 When it comes to homework, in other words, feeling good and doing good are entirely unrelated.

  A recent survey found that 80 percent of teens reported that going a day without technology made them feel “
bored,” “grumpy,” “sad,” and “uninformed.” A week without technology was regarded as “severe punishment.”25 (Needless to say, I chose not to share this study with my children.) Our kids are happiest—or so they report—when they are plugged in. They are also laziest, least focused, and least productive. That does our heads in, because as modern, psychologically attuned parents dedicated to micromanaging the states of our kids’ minds, at some level we assume that happiness is a prerequisite for achieving anything worthwhile.

  As Sussy would say: as if.

  Psychologist and father of three Michael Osit believes that feel-good technologies actively undermine the development of a basic work ethic, and are creating “a generation that is used to getting what it wants with minimal effort.”26

  “He says that like it’s a bad thing,” Anni objects. It’s a valid point. Osit also rails against the corrupting influence of Japanese cuisine—“If the kids are eating sushi at age ten,” he scolds, “what will they be asking for at fifteen and twenty-five?”—and suggests musicians who use applications such as composing software “Sibelius” are cheating.27

  But beneath the conservative bluster, Osit is onto something critical. Our kids really do have problems distinguishing between work time and playtime. For them, as for the rest of us, the Internet is both playground and workstation, snack bar and kitchen garden. “Just imagine trying to stick to your diet if you were asked to spend all day in your favorite bakery shop, or trying to stop drinking while you worked as a bartender,” writes Osit.28 Keeping the boundaries in place—hell, even remembering that there are boundaries—is hard enough if you’re a grown-up. For our kids, it may be impossible. Osit is a firm believer that it is a parent’s role to take control of the media environment. Expecting kids to do so on their own is like Googling “parenthood” for a job description.