The Winter of Our Disconnect (24 page)

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 imagination 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.

 

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

—
RAY PAHL,
professor of sociology, University of Essex
¹

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?”

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?

Q: Has The Experiment changed your relationships at all?

SUSSY: Anni and I are like we used to be. We’re tight again.

Q: Is that out of desperation, or . . .

S: Probs! (Laughs)

Q: Seriously, how’s it different?

S: It’s like, we chillax. We tell each other stuff now, like we used to. She helps me. I help her. We play the dice game. We play our creepy little ring game....

Q: What about Bill? How’s your relationship with him changed?

S: Um, I want to kill him more, because of the sax. It’s just. Soooo. LOUD!

A website devoted to helping people spend less time online? Well, I guess I’ve heard of stranger things. Like that after-school show where the hosts are constantly urging kids to get outside and ride their bikes. Seriously, it makes Huxley’s
Brave New World
look like a press release for Pfizer.

I, too, wanted to help people spend less time online, just like the folks who brought you minty-fresh breath. If only I’d thought of creating a website instead!