The Winter of Our Disconnect (19 page)

Suss on landline to Maddi for 2.5 solid hours.

A. reports The Experiment a popular discussion topic at Sunday pub session. One guy her age admitted he’d spent ten consecutive hours playing an online game that day. Says you know you’ve hit rock bottom when you can see the Tetris blocks falling on the inside of your eyes when you shut them to sleep.

Pointed out (as if I hadn’t noticed) that her screen-free room is much neater now—less a giant laundry hamper, “more of a haven” is how she put it.

B. home early from Fairbridge Music Festival, where has been camping with friends. Evidently forgot to pack clothes, pillows, shoes, or food. Oops. Asked humbly for clean sheets and sank onto them, book in hand, cool jazz on the stereo.

 

 

 

Bill played Satie’s
Gymnopédie No.1
, on the piano, beautifully.

Later, he came home from Pat’s house with sheet music. Had spent the day learning it. I was floored. Practiced sax scale drills (major-minor-harmonic-melodic) in kitchen while I cooked.

Overwhelmed with admiration, wonder ... and guilt. If we’d been “experimenting” all along, where would he be now??

 

 

 

B. got a job today!! And I thought the Satie thing was a miracle. Fifteen dollars each and every afternoon after school to vacuum and mop a very small café. He is rich. I am happy.

A. and self on couches tonight reading (
Why Men Marry Bitches
and
The Book Thief
, respectively) and doing
New York Times
cross-words from 1987 (unearthed from an ancient diary).

 

S. to Angel Café—suitably gowned and coiffed—to work on personal project (is creating a magazine for teens ...). There for FOUR HOURS! When asked how much of that actually spent on homework replied, “Probably half.”

Lil sleeping over. She and S. in family room playing Monopoly, eating Tim Tams and drinking cocoa, and spritzing kitten with a spray bottle to keep her from pouncing on hotels.

S. tells me all her friends are watching the not-yet-released Hannah Montana movie on Sidereel but she has taken a vow of chastity (as it were) and will “save herself” till the cinema launch.

What’s up with the dots? I ask him. What do you mean? he replies, puzzled. Isn’t that the proper way?

In other punctuation news ... Sussy’s friend Sean—completely OCT (obsessive compulsive texter)—now says the words “question mark” at the end of spoken questions. “Are you coming to the party, question mark?” he’ll ask, complete with rising inflection.

» 5

The Sound of One Hand Doing Homework

—
DANIEL BOORSTIN,
Cleopatra’s Nose

 

 

 

 

 

In a distant galaxy (like, six months ago), in the space formerly known as the family room, three teenagers are doing their homework—a task that requires wireless broadband with unlimited download allowance, six GBs of RAM, a terabyte of hard-drive space, five cell phones (two are just spending the night), three iPods, two printer/ scanners, and a color cartridge in a pear tree.

Everyone knows the Internet is a powerful research tool. Maybe that’s why using it to do homework is like exfoliating with an orbital sander. Like, sometimes it’s not good to go so deep. When all you want to know is why the Boxer Rebellion failed (and no, darling, it was not “something about the elastic”), and you get 32,700 results ... frankly, the mind Googles.

Sometimes it seems providing Internet access so your kids can do their homework is like using a vibrator to whip cream. It’s not only inefficient. It betrays a serious want of imagination.

Consider Sussy, ostensibly toiling away in there at an essay on e. e. cummings. At the moment, she has no fewer than nine windows active on her laptop. Six of them are online conversations that, leaving aside the missing punctuation, uncertain syntax, and sophomoric self-absorption, are off the topic entirely. A seventh is illegally siphoning off the latest episode of
The Secret Life of an American Teenager
, while an eighth is tracking an online auction for a pair of ... weirdos? “Weiros, Mum,” she corrects haughtily. “They’re birds.”

Oh, birds. Well, that makes sense, then. On the table, her cell phone, set to silent, squirms helplessly. I watch it with something akin to empathy.

Sussy—along with pretty much every other kid alive—insists that multitasking rules. The research sends a different message entirely. Although the latest neuroscientific reports confirm that media are changing the very structure of our brains, substantive evolution, like homework itself, is a painfully slow process. If Sussy were still writing that essay on e. e. cummings in 500,000 years (and at the time, the odds looked promising), she might have a good case. But for now? In our lifetimes? There isn’t the slightest doubt that monotasking kicks it.

Your kids will tell you otherwise. They’re not necessarily lying either. They may be absolutely convinced they can work just as well with half a dozen conversations and a couple of cyber-weiros squawking in the background as they can with silence. But these are the same people who think Micronesia is a software developer. Do we really want to take their word for it?

 

 

The Greek root of the word “technology,”
techne
, means “skill,” or “trickery.” Yeah, well. Sometimes it
is
hard to tell the difference. Maybe that explains why I was so often in a state of high alert watching the kids doing their, quote-unquote, homework within the media bubble our family room had become. Not that my anxiety ever did any good. Fretting over what, exactly, they were studying so intently—or with whom they were studying it—was my problem. Or so Anni would remind me, on those rare occasions when she’d break suction, visually speaking, from her laptop.

She was a straight-A student, give or take. Okay, so maybe there’d been a bit more take in the last couple of years. Year 12 had been spent almost entirely on exchange. At the time, that’s how I preferred to think about MySpace. Her absenteeism took its toll on her final grades, but she’d still done easily well enough to get into the university of her choice. Quibbling that the ninety wasn’t a ninety-seven was ungracious, but I did it nonetheless. “It’s not the grade that bothers me,” I’d stammered at the time. “It’s the . . . the effort.”

“What effort?” she wanted to know.

Well, exactly.

“But imagine the results you could have gotten if you’d tried,” I pressed. “If you took all the hours you’d spent on MySpace and MSN and poured them into Lit, or French.” She shrugged.

“I would have gotten higher test scores, I guess. But I would still have gotten into the same university, and I would still be majoring in journalism.”

“Can’t you think of any other differences?”

Finally, I could see a light dawning in her eyes. “Oh, I see what you mean,” she said. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of this myself?

“I wouldn’t have had a life.”

I reminded myself at such moments of William Morris, the nineteenth-century English designer and visionary. Morris liked to stage personal and completely ineffectual protests against technological excess too. Once he sat on his top hat to show contempt for the Stock Exchange. I’m sure it made him feel better, briefly, too.

Morris was no Luddite. In fact, he made a fortune mass-producing his designs for fabric and wallpaper. But, also like me, and probably you too, he was convinced that “if we hand over the whole responsibility of the details of our daily lives to machines and their drivers,” happiness would elude us. People needed to learn how to restrain themselves around technology, he believed—in fact, around all household stuff. “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” he famously admonished.

At one level, most of the gadgets my children were employing to do their homework fitted Morris’s criteria to a tee. The minimalist MacBook with its sleek lines and whisper-soft keyboard; the twinkling, tinkling little Nokias; the petal-pink Nintendo DS with a stylus as delicate as daisy stem. Considered singly, they really were useful and beautiful. It was when you threw them all together and stirred them around that things started to get ugly and pointless. Not to mention chaotic and cacophonous.

It was so very foreign to the way I myself work best: in monastic seclusion and pin-droppingly pure silence. Even the most innocuous background melody grates like fingernails on the blackboard of my attention span. Music with lyrics can make me scream with frustration. When we had an extension built some years ago, I grew accustomed to the racket of the power tools. But the talkback on the tradesmen’s radios nearly killed me. In the end, I was driven to using earphones on my own radio, tuned to static. As for television, having it on in the background while I try to write—or even read—is almost physically painful. At the first few bars of the
Simpsons
theme song, I swear I can hear my ideas snapping like twigs.

“Can’t you just block it out and pretend it’s not there?” plead the kids.

“Absolutely,” I say, advancing on the “Off” button. If I can’t hear what I’m writing, I try to explain, it’s no longer creating prose. It’s tossing word salad.

My children naturally regard my work habits as freakish. But they are fairly common among Boomers. In our day, people still sat down to watch television. It was an intentional thing, and it usually involved a program guide. There were no remotes. There were no DVDs in people’s bedrooms. (That, I explain to my wondering children, would have been like having a gas barbecue next to the bed, or a flush toilet in the closet. “Sick!” they chorus.) Television had not yet become the soundtrack for family life—the not-beautiful, not-useful wallpaper lining every household’s personal space; the visual cud on which the entire culture chewed.

“But Mum . . . We
need
the background noise,” they explain. They speak slowly, as if
I
were the one with the intellectual impairment. As, arguably, I may be.

Sussy confides that one of the reasons she loves her school is the teachers allow iPods during class. “During CLASS?!” I sputter. (For this educational privilege I’m refinancing the family home?)

“Well, yeah. Why not? When we’re doing projects and stuff.”

I tell her about the time my father yelled at me for humming under my breath at the dinner table. I tell her about my primary school cafeteria, where you weren’t allowed to talk. I tell her about the fitness revolution sparked by the appearance of the Walkman in the late seventies. (“The idea that you could go jogging and listen to music at the same time blew people’s minds,” I explain. “Random!” she cries with real feeling. “But I don’t get it, Mum. What’s ‘jogging’?”)

No wonder my generation doesn’t do well with a lot going on in the background—not cognitively, at any rate. For us, as for Gerald Ford, who famously struggled to chew gum and lead the free world, doing more than one thing at a time is a reach.

The multitasking millennials we have spawned may be fully functional with a device in every orifice, or they may not. But we, their Boomer and Gen X parents, know our limits. We excel at monotasking.

Our kids smile indulgently at our limitations. It’s as if our inability to multitask were some quaint but faintly repulsive evolutionary vestige—like hairy knuckles or a monobrow. When we thunder, “But how can you THINK with that racket going on?” they explain sweetly, “The thing is: Our brains are different.” (I don’t know about yours, but my own kids seem to have learned neuroscience before their times tables.) They don’t say “superior,” or “more highly evolved,” but that’s what they mean, and they and I both know it.

Bill’s idea of dressing for dinner is wearing board shorts that Velcro all the way up. Shoes? That’s pushing it. Anni, who prides herself on her immaculate grooming, sheds her hair extensions as unthinkingly as a snake sheds its skin. Yesterday I noticed them on top of the piano, snarled like roadkill. Sussy pours cereal directly into the drawer, where, most of the time, it hits a bowl.

Believe me when I tell you: Their brains
are
different.

However, I’m pretty sure that’s not what they’re getting at when they assure me that multitasking is a piece of cake (when, to me, it looks like a mangled collection of crumbs). They probably mean more or less what Don Tapscott says in his buoyantly optimistic book
Grown Up Digital
. “Parents have said to me: ‘How can my kid be doing homework, while he’s also listening to MP3 files, he’s texting on his phone, he’s got three windows open on the computer—one of them Facebook—and he’s petting the dog? How is this possible?’” Tapscott’s answer is scarily identical to Bill’s. “Well,” he says, “it turns out they have different brains.”
¹

A Canadian business consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and no children, Tapscott assures parents that worrying about kids’ multitasking is like worrying that your mate no longer carries a club. “These kids grow up interacting and collaborating, thinking and organizing, scrutinizing, having to remember things, managing information. And that affects the actual wiring, synaptic connections, and structure of kids’ brains. So they have better switching abilities and better working active memory. If I’m doing several things at once, I can’t keep track of what the heck is going on, but they can. So this is creating a generation that thinks, works, and learns very differently.”
²

The last sentence I have no problem with. About the rest, I’m not so sure. Better switching abilities? Hmm. On the remote, perhaps. Better working memory? Well, maybe—as long as we’re not counting the number of cell phones, iPods, and chargers missing in action on the bus last year. Call me unevolved, but I get nervous when non-scientists start talking about the “actual wiring” in our heads.