When they went on to college, this early smartphone generation did not grow more tolerant of what they are so quick to call boredom. We’ve met Judy, whom I interview when she is a college junior. A slow moment in class sends her immediately to her phone, where she goes through the “circuit” of all of her social apps, just to check them. She says that she likes the feeling of “rapid-fire switching” and thinks that no class could ever compete with it, no matter how engaging. Why? The class “is only one mode of stimulus.”
So, dropping out of a classroom conversation can begin with a moment of boredom, because a friend reaches out to you, or because, as one student in my memoir class put it, “You just want to see who wants you.” And once you are in that “circuit of apps,” you want to stay with them.
In classrooms, the distracted are a distraction: Studies show that when students are in class multitasking on laptops, everyone around them learns less. One college senior says, “I’ll be in a great lecture and look over and see someone shopping for shoes and think to myself, ‘Are you kidding me?’ So I get mad at them, but then I get mad at myself for being self-righteous. But after I’ve gone through my cycle of indignation to self-hate, I realize that I have missed a minute of the lecture, and then I’m really mad.”
It’s easy to see how concentration would be disrupted in this crucible of emotion. But even for those who don’t get stirred up, when you see someone in your class on Facebook or checking their email, two things cross your mind: Maybe this class is boring, and maybe I, too, should attend to some online business. Yet despite research that shows that multitasking is bad for learning, the myth of the moment is still that multitasking is a good idea. A series of ads for AT&T show a young man chatting with a group of schoolchildren about the things children know. Or perhaps, the things children know that adults want to validate. One of the things that the children and the adult agree on is that faster is better. A second is that it is better to do more than one thing at a time. This is a myth that dies hard.
And we are not inclined to let it die because multitasking feels good. It is commonplace to talk about multitaskers as addicted. I don’t like to talk about addiction in this context because I find that discussing the holding power of technology in these terms makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel they are facing something against which resistance seems almost futile. This is a fallacy. In this case, resistance is not futile but highly productive. Writers, artists, scientists, and literary scholars talk openly about disenabling the Wi-Fi on their computers in order to get creative work done. In the acknowledgments of her most recent book, the novelist Zadie Smith thanks Freedom and SelfControl, programs that shut off connectivity on her Mac.
The analogy between screens and drugs breaks down for other reasons. There is only one thing that you should do if you are on heroin: Get off the heroin. Your life is at stake. But laptops and smartphones are not things to remove. They are facts of life and part of our creative lives. The goal is to use them with greater intention.
Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don’t always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it’s up to us to promote “unitasking.”
It’s encouraging that it is often children who recognize their vulnerabilities to technology and come up with ways to deal with them, even when adults are pulling them in another direction. In fact, the critique of multitasking is a good example of where I’ve seen children take the lead. Reyna, fourteen, has been issued an iPad at school. The entire eighth-grade curriculum is on it. But so are her email and favorite games, including Candy Crush. In order to get work done, she prints out her reading assignments and puts aside the iPad. She learned to do this from her sister, who had experienced the same attention problems with a curriculum-on-a-tablet. Reyna describes the problem:
People really liked [the iPad] because . . . they could look things up really quickly in class, but also . . . people were getting really distracted. Like, my sister had an iPad and she said that her and her friends’ texts were blocked but they had school emails. And they would sit in class and pretend to be researching but really they were emailing back and forth just because they were bored—or they would take screenshots of a test practice sheet and send it out to their friends that hadn’t had the class yet.
But my sister also said that even when she and her friends were just trying to study for a test, “they would go and print everything that they had on their iPads,” because studying was made a lot more difficult because of all the other distractions on the iPad, all the other apps they could download.
This student knows that it is hard to concentrate in class when you are holding a device that you associate with games and messaging—a device built to encourage doing one thing and then another and another. Reyna came to her experience with the iPad at school with many advantages: She had experienced school without it. She remembered that she used to be less distracted. She had a point of comparison and she had her sister as a mentor. But increasingly, students like Reyna are the exception. Children who begin school with an iPad won’t know that you can “force” a state of greater concentration by using media that allow you to do only one thing at a time. It’s up to a more experienced generation to teach them.
Students who print out their assignments in order to have time away from screens should give educators pause when they, with the best of intentions, try to make things more efficient by closing the library and declaring books obsolete.
The Opposite of Unitasking: Hyper Attention
Many educators begin with an accommodation: They note that students text and search the web in class, and they say, “Fine”—in previous days, students would find other ways to zone out, and this is the twenty-first-century equivalent. But some educators do more than accommodate the distractions of digital media. They see a new sensibility of fractured attention and they want to use it as an opportunity to teach in a new way.
So, literary theorist Katherine Hayles argues that fractured attention is the sensibility of the twenty-first century and that to look back to “deep attention” in the classroom is to be unhelpfully nostalgic. (My skepticism begins here, as I think of Reyna and her sister, who print out their reading assignments so as not to be distracted on the iPad.) Students, says Hayles, think in a new mode, the mode of “hyper attention.” Given the realities of the classroom, educators have a choice: “Change the students to fit the educational environment or change that environment to fit the students.”
In other words, for Hayles, there is no real choice. Education must embrace the culture of hyper attention. As an example of a constructive way to do this, Hayles points to experiments at the University of Southern California in a classroom outfitted with screens.
One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”: While a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the web for appropriate content to display on the screens—for example, sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the material being presented.
There is no doubt that Google jockeying speaks to our moment. Students say that they want to turn away from class when there is a lull. Google jockeying implicitly says, all right, we will get rid of those lulls. Even experienced faculty start to ramp up their PowerPoint presentations in a spirit (not always acknowledged) of competing with students’ screens. Or we tell them, as Hayles suggests, to go to the web during class time for opposing views, images, and comments. Or to make a comment of their own.
But there is another way to respond to students who
complain that they need more stimulation than class conversation provides. It is to tell them that a moment of boredom can be an opportunity to go inward to your imagination, an opportunity for new thinking.
If a moment of boredom happens in a classroom, rather than competing for student attention with ever more extravagant technological fireworks (Google jockeying!), we should encourage our students to stay with their moment of silence or distraction. We can try to build their confidence that such moments—when you stay with your thoughts—have a payoff. We can present classrooms as places where you can encounter a moment of boredom and “walk” toward its challenges. A chemistry professor puts it this way: “In my class I want students to daydream. They can go back to the text if they missed a key fact. But if they went off in thought . . . they might be making the private connection that pulls the course together for them.”
When those who are fluent in both deep attention and hyper attention—and certainly Hayles is in this group—look at hyper attention, it is tempting to see something exciting because it is new. But they still have a choice. They can switch between ways of knowing. But children who grow up in an all-multitasking environment may not have a choice.
A life of multitasking limits your options so that you cannot simply “pick up” deep attention. What is most enriching is having fluency in both deep and hyper attention. This is attentional pluralism and it should be our educational goal. You can choose multitasking. You can also focus on one thing at a time. And you know when you should.
But attentional pluralism is hard to achieve. Hyper attention feels good. And without practice, we can lose the ability to summon deep attention.
Eric Schmidt, of Google, spoke to a college audience and expressed his own concern. He told the students that he used to read books on airplanes, the one place where there was no Wi-Fi. Now, with Wi-Fi on airplanes, things have changed: “Now I spend all my time being online, doing my emails, interacting and all that, and the book doesn’t get read. I think we’ve got to work on that.” Schmidt made this comment while promoting a book he authored that celebrates, even in its subtitle, how technology will “reshape” people. Schmidt isn’t happy that he has exchanged books for email and messages, but he believes in the forward march of technology.
Elizabeth, a graduate student in economics, is not so sure about the forward march. She is convinced that the “natural multitasking” of her work life has left her with diminished cognitive capacity.
Before graduate school, Elizabeth worked as a consultant. It was a job that led her to make multitasking a way of life. “For instance, I could be fielding emails from clients, looking up industry data to insert into a PowerPoint presentation for an urgent meeting, researching which restaurant to take my best friend to that night, while writing the actual requirements document I was supposed to be working on that day. My routine practice of multitasking led to another behavior—skimming.” It was only when Elizabeth returned to the university that she saw the full effect of years spent multitasking, a life lived in hyper attention. Now, as a graduate student, she has been assigned an excerpt of Plato’s Republic for an ethics class.
I had skimmed the chapter, as was my habit, then, realizing that I hadn’t retained much, reread it again and even made a few notes. Unfortunately, on the day of the class, I did not have that notebook with me, and while I remembered the overall gist of the chapter (moderation—good; desire for luxury—bad), I struggled to recall specific ideas expressed in it. Without access to my cell phone to refer to the article or read up on Plato on Wikipedia, I wasn’t able to participate in the class discussion. Having access to information is always wonderful, but without having at least some information retained in my brain, I am not able to build on those ideas or connect them together to form new ones.
As I speak with Elizabeth, it is clear that more is at stake than disappointment in her class performance. If she can’t “build on ideas or connect them together to form new ones,” she knows she won’t be able to have certain kinds of conversations—in her view, probably the most important ones.
And attention is not a skill we learn for one domain. When you train your brain to multitask as your basic approach—when you embrace hyper attention—you won’t be able to focus even when you want to. So, you’re going to have trouble sitting and listening to your children tell you about their day at school. You’re going to have trouble at work sitting in a meeting and listening to your colleagues. Their narrative will seem painfully slow. Just as middle school children don’t acquire the skills for conversation because they lack practice, university students lose the capacity to sit in a class and follow a complex argument. Research shows that when college students watch online educational videos, they watch for six minutes no matter how long the video. So videos for online courses are being produced at six minutes. But if you become accustomed to getting your information in six-minute bites, you will grow impatient with more extended presentations. One college senior describes her friends’ taste for the short and terse: “If they had their choice, conversations would begin with a tweet and end in a tweet.”
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, had long observed students’ fractured attention spans but did not feel personally implicated until one evening when she sat down to read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, one of her favorite authors. Wolf found it impossible to focus on the book. She panicked and wondered if her life on the web had cost her this ability. When Eric Schmidt noted his difficulty with sustained reading, he remarked, “We’ve got to work on that.” Wolf immediately got to work. She began to study what skimming, scanning, and scrolling do to our ability to read with deep attention—what she calls “deep reading.” Her thesis is that a life lived online makes deep attention harder to summon. This happens because the brain is plastic—it is constantly in flux over a lifetime—so it “rewires” itself depending on how attention is allocated.
Wolf, Hayles, and Schmidt have all diagnosed a problem with deep attention. But they turn in different directions when it comes to what to do next. Hayles argues for a conscious pedagogical accommodation to the new sensibility. Schmidt shrugs and says that in the end, technology will lead us in the right direction. Wolf’s focus on the plasticity of the brain gives her a different perspective. For if the brain is plastic, this means that at any age, it can be set to work on deep attention. Put otherwise, if we decide that deep attention is a value, we can cultivate it. Indeed, that is what Wolf discovered for herself. She had trouble with the Hesse but kept at it. And she says that after two weeks of effort, she was once again able to focus sufficiently to immerse herself in deep reading. Wolf’s experience suggests a pedagogy that supports unitasking and deep reading. But if we value these, we have to actively choose them.
Grazing
Hayles is not alone in her enthusiasm for hyper attention. In Born Digital, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser describe in glowing terms a new style of learner who picks up things here and there, taking bits and pieces from a Wikipedia article, a clip from Comedy Central, a Twitter feed, the results of a Google search. In general, these new learners read headlines and gaze at images; they tinker and associate. They graze. When they need to go deep, they pause and dive. Palfrey and Gasser argue that there is no reason to think that an older generation, trained to gather information by focusing on several trusted sources read in depth, had a better learning style. It was just different.
But in practice, grazing makes it hard to develop a narrative to frame events, for example, to think about history or current events. The problem can sometimes begin with something as simple as not knowing the names of the actors in the drama. An eleventh grade teacher puts it this way: “My students are struggling. No dates, no geography, no sense of how to weigh the importance of things.”
The problem isn’t web surfing. It’s turning to bits and pieces at times when a more sustained narrative, the kind you are more likely to meet in a book o
r long article, would be a better choice. This teacher is saying that her students don’t have the materials in mind to consider the whole and so they have trouble arguing a point of view. But they continue to skip what this teacher calls “basic content,” thinking that this is something the web will fill them in on—someday. The web is their “information prosthetic” and they see no cost to having one.
We have met Maureen, thirty-two, who feels that without her phone she “doesn’t have anything to say.” Maureen compares herself to her mother, who knew poetry by heart. Maureen knows no poetry; more than this, in school, she says, she was never asked to memorize anything, “no dates or places in history.” When she needed a fact, she looked it up online. This leaves Maureen feeling empty without her phone. But when she has her phone, she has facts at her fingertips but no timeline or narrative to slide them into. For her, another fact about the United States in 1863 simply floats free in its own universe, somewhere out there in the cloud; it is not added to a story about the Civil War that Maureen already knows.
When I talk to high school and college students today, I see a lot of Maureens in the making, students confident they will always have their phones if they need to look something up, and who will perhaps someday regret their lack of “context.” For now, teachers in middle and high school are left trying to make a case for why students should be asked to remember people, places, chronology—the story. And why they should slow down.
“They Want the Right Answer. Quickly!”
I run a focus group on technology in education for twenty teachers and administrators from independent high schools in the Northeast. They worry that their students are in a rush. Here are some of the thoughts around the table: “They don’t think anything should take time.” “They are not particularly interested in listening to each other. If they have a question, they want the right answer. Quickly!” They want that answer directly and “don’t understand the idea of a process.” Ideas should appear with the immediacy of search results: “They don’t appreciate how an argument develops and sometimes needs to take side paths and turns.”
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