The Winter of Our Disconnect (23 page)

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” Stevens
^c
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.

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.