When we work at our very peak, it often feels like play. And when we play at our peak, it is often very hard work indeed. For young children, learning and playing are almost always indistinguishable—and ought to be. There is no necessary connection between fun and learning, but to argue that enjoying oneself somehow prevents learning is plain ignorant. Research shows that kids do acquire skills from all those hours spent socializing on their media. Which skills, exactly, nobody is completely certain.
A $50 million MacArthur Foundation study on digital and media learning surveyed more than eight hundred teenagers over a three-year period. “It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media,” lead researcher Mizuko Ito told The New York Times, “but their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world.”29 Reading these words, I try hard not to think about Anni’s obsession with Farmville—a time-sucking Facebook-based simulation game that involves planting fake crops and raising fake livestock in cooperation with fake neighbors. (“See what you can achieve!” my brilliant daughter said proudly as she showed me her two-dimensional “farm.” It was hard to know whether to laugh, cry, or oink.)
“They’re learning how to get along with others,” Ito insists. “How to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”30 How to harvest fake soybeans.
Neuroscientist Gary Small agrees that being online sharpens some cognitive abilities. Digital Natives respond more quickly to visual stimuli and are better at certain forms of attention—for instance, noticing images in their peripheral vision. They are also better skimmers, able to “sift through large amounts of information rapidly and decide what’s important and what isn’t,” and they may have higher self-esteem as a result of a greater sense of personal autonomy and control. Finally, like other brain scientists, Small speculates about the evolution of neural circuitry “that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed concentration.”31
Media can be distracting while children do homework, but it can also pay unexpected dividends. In 2008, University of Phoenix researcher Selene Finch conducted an in-depth, qualitative, phenomenological analysis—aka, she watched a bunch of kids do their homework—and found that instant messaging was sometimes a useful learning tool, especially for seeking homework help from classmates. True, this “helpfulness” could also cross the line into full-scale cheating, as evidenced by the participant who admitted that she and her buddies would split up their assigned work, then IM each other the finished products. The girl told Finch she knew this “sounded unethical.”
“We probably talked about homework online sometimes,” one subject allowed. “My typing skills got really good,” another enthused.32 Overall, the benefits seemed rather weak.
A recent British study cited in The Futurist at the beginning of 2009 found that smartphones deployed in the classroom could be a “powerful learning tool,” enabling students to set homework reminders, record lessons, access relevant websites, and transfer files between school and home.33 A 2008 Harris Interactive/Telecommunications Trade Association survey found that 18 percent of teenagers believed their cell phones were having “a positive influence on their education,” while 39 percent of teen smartphone users said they accessed the Internet on their phones “for national and world news.”34 (LOL!)
There is also a growing market in “homework management solutions” software such as Schoolwires Centricity, touted as an enabler of “teacher-student collaboration like never before.” According to its website, among other features, Schoolwires “allows students to keep track of upcoming assignments” while enabling teachers to “deploy and manage multiple custom, interactive websites; to implement advanced Web 2.0/multimedia capabilities, such as blogs, podcasts, and photo galleries; and to enable all users—from novices to power users—to utilize the functionality that meets their needs and comfort levels.” Yikes! Then there are Internet-based utilities such as Parent Portal, which allow parents to access their kids’ grades and attendance, in addition to teachers’ homework and lesson plans.
Schools in the tiny Arkansas town of Howe—where 75 percent of students qualify for subsidized lunches and the superintendent drives the bus—have had success using iPods loaded with lesson content, including “songs about multiplication facts” and teachers’ notes transmitted directly from classroom-based SmartBoards.35 Science teacher Jim Askew is proud that the federally funded program—it cost $1.5 million to build and maintain—means there are no books in his classroom. “I’ll bet there’s a whole bunch of science rooms around now that still have science books that say there are nine planets, but that’s been changed since Pluto was demoted,” he observes with pride. But Askew is equally adamant that using new media to enrich student learning is no quick fix, insisting, “Anybody who thinks technology saves teachers’ time is wrong.”36
It’s a lesson many other schools have had to learn the old-fashioned way. Northfield Mount Hermon, for example, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, pulled the plug on its laptop program when school officials realized more effort was going into repairing the computers than teaching or learning with them. At Liverpool High School in upstate New York, millions of dollars in government grants were awarded to provide laptops for all students in an effort to bridge the so-called digital divide between those who could afford home computers and those who couldn’t. Seven years later, the school board president admitted, “There was literally no evidence” the laptop program “had any impact on student achievement—none.” Schools in Broward County, Florida, leased six thousand laptops at a cost of $7.2 million. Here, at least, students reported two clear educational benefits: Their typing improved and they became astoundingly proficient at Super Mario Brothers. The district discontinued the program anyway.
More systematic studies of laptop learning send the same message. One such, which compared twenty-one middle schools that had laptop programs with twenty-one middle schools that didn’t, found no difference whatsoever in student test scores. Maybe that’s the good news. Because many teachers complain that “the box”—think Pandora and the ruin of man—actually impedes student learning. Listening to Sussy and her pals, it’s easy to understand why.
Her school, which still has a laptop program, does what it can to block social media, IM utilities, and gaming on students’ state-of-the-art MacBooks. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. And where there’s Wi-Fi, there’s an even faster way. When MySpace got blocked, everybody migrated to Facebook. When Facebook got blocked, they flitted away to Twitter. Not allowed to e-mail during class? Fine, we’ll Skype instead. Cell phones banned? No worries. We can send SMSs cheaper using text4free.net.
The problem isn’t confined to Year 10 schoolgirls awaiting hormonal updates. “People are going to lectures by some of the greatest minds, and they are doing their mail,” MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology Sherry Turkle told Time magazine. “I tell them this is not a place for e-mail, it’s not a place to do online searches.... It’s not going to help if there are parallel discussions about how boring it is,” she added. “You’ve got to get people to participate in the world as it is.”37 UCLA and the University of Virginia have given up appealing to students’ better natures. They simply block Internet access during lectures.
Kids have never been more mentally agile—or more culturally clumsy—than the Digital Natives we are rearing and occasionally fearing. Anyhow, that’s the opinion of Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, who believes passionately that technology, instead of opening young minds to knowledge, “has contracted their horizons to themselves, to the social scene around them.”38
Bauerlein argues that our kids’ relentless exposure to screens has equipped them beautifully for more exposure to screens. And precious little else. On the contrary, “It conditions minds against quiet, concerted study, against ima
gination unassisted by visuals, against linear, sequential analysis of text, against an idle afternoon with a detective story.”39 Reading rates for young people suggest this is more than standard-brand conservative kvetchery. In 1982, two out of three eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds were reading for pleasure. By 2002, fewer than 43 percent were. The number of seventeen-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for fun doubled between 1984 and 2004. Notes Bauerlein shrewdly, “If young adults abandoned a product in another consumer realm at the same rate, say, cell phone usage, the marketing departments at Sprint and Nokia would shudder”—and fix it, fast.40
And speaking of the sound of one hand doing homework, have you heard the one about the martial artist who meets the Zen master? “My swordsmanship is legendary throughout the land,” the fighter boasts. “And what about your special powers? What can you do?”
The Zen master thinks about it and replies, “When I walk, I just walk. When I eat, I just eat. When I talk, I just talk.”
And when he writes an essay on e. e. cummings, I’m betting, he just writes an essay on e. e. cummings.
Midterm Interview
April 4, 2009
Q: Well, guys, we’re at the halfway point. Three months! Can you believe it?
BILL: It feels like longer.
ANNI: To be honest, I haven’t actually noticed it that much. I’m surprised how little I’ve missed it. I thought it would just be killing me. But it’s been fine.
SUSSY: The worst parts are there’s never anything to do. I can’t do schoolwork when I want. And I can’t go for walks ’cause I don’t have my iPod.
Q: Because it’s impossible to walk without an iPod?
S: Yeah.
Q: You did some homework today, didn’t you?
S: Yeah, we had to go to McDonald’s to use the Wi-Fi but they didn’t have an electrical outlet so we went to the X-Wray Café, but the backpackers stole the Internet . . .
Q: How do you steal the Internet?
S: Well, they downloaded all this stuff so it doesn’t work anymore, so we went to the Angel Café . . . Yeah, it’s hell nice in there. We stayed for three hours.
Q: Did you do homework all that time?
S: MySpaced for a bit, but mostly, yeah.
Q: Has The Experiment affected the quality of your schoolwork?
B: Nah.
A: Not really. It hasn’t been a problem going to uni to get my work done.
Q: So all that stuff about “I need the Internet to do my homework” is . . .
A: A total cover!
Q: Do you feel like a different person in some ways?
B: I’m not a different person but some aspects of life have definitely changed. Basically, I’m playing sax more and reading more, yeah. But I think the technology thing was more of a trigger. Like, if everything went back on right now, I wouldn’t change. Like, why would I? It’s more fun than playing with the computer.
Q: Do you find you’re listening to the radio more?
B: Nah, radio is crap. I listen to my CDs, and that usually makes me want to play my sax, so . . . yeah. Also, I think I play with Rupert and Hazel a bit more. But that’s it.
Q: Would you say you spend more time thinking now?
A: Yeah. Like before I would spend heaps of time doing nothing, but it would take the form of maybe Facebook-stalking or something. Now, well, you find other ways to have fun. Going out more. Went through a big cooking phase for a while there, but that’s died down now. Listening to the radio a lot more.
Q: What’s that like?
A: Well, you miss the customization you have with your iPod. Like, you can’t always have what you want when you want it—a song or a TV show or whatever. But you adjust.
S: I’m reading way more, and faster. I feel smarter. In the book section of MySpace most people are like, books? CBF!
Q: Yeah, but you’ve always been a reader.
S: Yeah, but I’m reading more intense books now, and bigger ones. Not just like Princess Diaries, LOL! Well, I’m still reading them too but . . . Like Prep. I started that a million times but never finished and now I have. And Bright Shiny Morning, which was really, really good but some of the facts were, like, hell boring . . . and now I’m reading Finding Alaska, which I just started tonight, about some guy at a boarding school. Oh, and that David Sedaris one—can I lend that to Sean, by the way? I think he would really like it. Oh, and PS, this weekend Fia’s having a partay . . .
Q: Anything else?
S: Done more eating, for shiz . . . But yeah, I’m so bored all the time. I want an iPod!
Q: How have your friends reacted?
S: First they go, “WTF?!” Then, “Cool! Your mum’s a writer?” LOL. Georgie was like, “I don’t care. We can play the Hannah Montana Trivia Game,” and Ali was like, “No computers ? Cool, that’s even better.” Lil’s always up for a good board game . . .
B: They all say it sucks when I tell them about it. Like, that sounds really inconvenient and your mother is really a freak and stuff like that. Just like, “Why would she do that?”
A: Some are, “Oh God, I can’t believe your mum is making you do that,” but most people are just, “Oh really? Fair enough.” Actually adults have a more extreme reaction than kids do.
Q: You’re kidding.
A: No, really. Every one of your friends, they’re like, “Why can’t I get hold of your mum?” and then I tell them and they’re like, “OOOOHHHH MYYYYYYYY GODDDDDD!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT!!!”
Q: Interesting!
A: Yeah, they’re like, “What about your homework?!”
» 6
Loss of Facebook: Friending the Old-fashioned Way
Anyone who thinks they have 200 friends has got no friends.
—RAY PAHL, professor of sociology, University of Essex1
Week eight of The Experiment. It’s high summer in Western Australia—hot, dry, and as dull as an assistant principal on a first date. We love our city (most of the time). It’s so clean. So safe. So pretty. But it comes honestly by its nickname: Dullsville. Perth is a place where stores still close at 5:30 p.m. during the week, and all day on Sundays. Where restaurants that serve meals after 9:00 p.m. are as rare as a kookaburra’s canines, and nightlife as we know it—unless we happen to be a marsupial—is unknown.
For preschoolers and old-age pensioners, Perth is probably as close to paradise as you can get without a doctor’s prescription. But for the rest of us, life can go just a teensy bit slow mo’. Teenagers—with their high need for social stimulation—suffer especially from all this freaking serenity. So I guess it’s not surprising that binge-drinking starts early in these parts, or that vandalism and petty acts of public violence are more common than in many much bigger cities. The average teen has sex at the age of fifteen here. (“Thank God, my kids are above average,” I think every time I read that statistic.)
In some ways, or so you could argue, Perth kids need their media more than most, what with the tyranny of distance they experience day to day simply by virtue of living so literally on the edge of things. That’s something I worried about a lot in the early days of The Experiment. I was worrying about it that very midsummer night, driving home from a concert through the eerie stillness of a Saturday night in the world’s most isolated city.
And then, pulling into the driveway, I hear funny sounds coming from the living room. And voices. Loud voices. Loud male voices. My heart lurches in my chest. I don’t have a cell phone anymore, so there’s no way anybody can contact me while I’m out. Up to now, I’ve been fine with that. In fact, I’ve been ecstatic with that. But at this moment ...? I race to the open front door and that’s when I see it. I stand there in shock, my mouth as round as a laser disc.
It’s a bunch of kids, five of them, around the piano.
They.
Are.
Singing.
Toto? I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
“What’s next on the agenda, dudes? A taffy pull?” is what I�
��m thinking but don’t dare say. If they are sleepwalking in another decade, far be it from me to disturb them. This, I realize, as I practically tiptoe to my bedroom, strenuously feigning nonchalance, is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Doing homework, sure. Reading and listening to music, absolutely. Practicing saxophone, cooking meals, sleeping and eating better—all of that has been extremely gratifying. At times verging on the magical, even. But it’s this above all else—this, what would you call it? Connecting? One to the other, in real time and space, in three dimensions, and with all five senses ablaze....
I realize they are a long way from roasting a woodchuck over the open coals. But I’m having a Thoreauvian moment, nonetheless. I get into bed and rifle through Walden. I’d give anything to hit CtrlF—the “Find and Replace” shortcut—right now. The irony of that is not lost on me. But neither, as it happens, is the passage I’ve been seeking:
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it or, if it were sublime, to know it by experience . . .”
I underline it in green, to the strains of Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface.” It’s awful. And I’ve never heard anything so lovely.
The next morning I read the passage to Sussy. “Do you understand what Thoreau is getting at, honey?” I ask. “I think so,” she replies. “It’s like... RL, right?”
Midterm Interview cont’d
Q: Have there been any positives for you so far?
ANNI: I think we’re closer as a family, for sure.
Q: Why’s that?
A: Because we talk more. It’s like, “There’s people in this house . . . Let’s talk to them!” Suss and Bill come into my room now. It’s been years since they’ve done that—just to hang out and have conversations. Just to talk, you know?
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 18
