Over the past 5 years, as the explosion of our web 2.0 world has taken off, I have watched the performance of students in my class. While I cannot attribute (or blame) everything I see to the Internet, I have increasingly become concerned, or at least inquisitive, about the impact of our new world.
I have long thought about this in general terms, seeing the Internet as a possible solution for our society’s greatest loss of the past 40 years—the death of community. The opportunity presented through social interaction first seen in the AOL portal of communities of interest is both large and helpful. Now with facebook et al, I can connect and maintain relationships with people from the various stages of my prior life.
Positive Discretionary Time
At the same time, we are seeing more and more people using their discretionary time for positive benefit. Or, at least, many are using it for something other than passive TV. While their could be a debate about whether there is any different between hours spent passively before a TV verses hours spent passively before a computer, at least in general terms we can see some activity.
In the last Wired magazine issue, they discuss the recent work of two authors whose research indicates that many people have replaced lazy TV time with active, self-interest time (just as I am doing now writing this blog). The entire open source world is predicated on the notion of literally thousands, or in the case of Wikipedia, millions of user synergistically building a product greater than they could individually. Long a supporter of Wikipedia (much to the dismay of most of my colleagues in my College), I believe that these researchers are on to something.
They make the connection not just to a better use of our time, but to the concepts of motivation. They are noting the strong research that indicates that if someone is rewarded clearly (say with money) for an activity, the person becomes less interested in the activity. Interestingly enough, on Saturday I took my eldest daughter Logan to a Sci-Fi Convention where we heard a presentation by an artist who has worked for Disney and on the recent TV show Battlestar Galactica.
This research has, I believe, great implication for education and for businesses. Seth Godin’s last book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
More personally, the result is that we as a society are becoming increasingly more involved in creation of things (youtube clips, iPhone apps, mashups, Google products, Photoshop creations and the like). That’s a good thing. . .to a degree.
Negative Implications for the Brain
Yet, increasingly as my daughters have aged toward their teen years, I have worried about the time they have spent with media. Research over the past 30 years has raised the negative specter of too much media. And while the above researchers try to differentiate between TV and computer media, other experts see this as the same negative issue. In the April issue of Fast Company, the magazine took a look at the impact of technology on education.
While the positive article was promoting much of the good feelings as the Wired article, they mentioned a troubling fact in passing. “American children now spend 7.5 hours a day absorbing and creating media—as much time as they spend in school. Even more remarkably [or negatively perhaps—ed] they multitask across screens to cram 11 hours of content into those 7.5 hours.” And that is happening in a myriad of ways—ipods, smartphones, computers, TV, game systems and so on.
So, worse than TV days, now we have children consuming 11 hours of content, created or not. What, I wonder, does that do to the brain? I know for myself, having been raised in the 70s, I don’t see much of an issue, but then I am not the multitasker. In fact, what I see in me verses what I see in my daughter is what troubles me. She is one of the examples—watching, listening, writing, all at the same time in a variety of ways. And, her work via school suffers because of it. She struggles to stay focused. Many of my college student display the same sort of problem.
MTV Generation 2.0??
Many conversations with colleagues goes down this road relative to how we do what we do. Worse than the MTV Generation where, so we were told, the attention span was down to only minutes of time, this generation seems to have no attention span capabilities. Now, that idea is really not accurate, but it is how it seems to many of my peers, and at times to me.
I wondered, is it possible that the vast explosion of “ADD” and “ADHD” diagnosis could actually be related to this problem? Have we allowed some evil into our culture that is harming our children? Back to the Sci-Fi artist—when he was sharing about his experience, I asked about his background. He said that he was raised in the country, with limited TV opportunity, so he drew everything he could see. Wendell Berry makes much of the same observation—our modern world has become so fast as to disconnect each of us from the earth, from the world around us.
Well, in the same Wired magazine, another article about the Internet presented the research of UCLA professor of psychiatry Gary Small who has put research to my concerns. What Small has found is that the Internet actually rewires our brain neural pathways. While this could be a positive or a negative, and we are just on the cusp of decades of research to determine a more full picture, Small’s observations are chilling.
Training our brains for crap
The article shares, “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.. . .[The Internet] is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”
One researcher from Stanford put it this way: “Intensive multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy; everything distracts them.” Michael Merzenich, from the field of neuroplasticity, says that the Internet and how we use it is “training our brains to pay attention to crap.”
Where do we go?
So, what do we do with this? Trust me, you aren’t going to get an argument that we should somehow try to eliminate the Internet. Even if many of you agreed with me, we understand instinctively that it simply would never happen. The Internet provides too much ease, and has a clear positive upside. We know this every time we video chat with someone across the world, or find some obscure product to purchase.
My peers have debated this openly and as one friend said it, the sheer fact that we are even discussing trying to limit computers or smartphones in the classroom shows that we are generally a generation removed from our students. These kids have mostly all grown up with the Web around them, and with products that “just work.”
At best, we can arm ourselves with knowledge. We can determine that after reading this post, its time to get up from the computer. We can choose to do something tangible like building something, reading a real book or helping at some non-profit organization. And we can warn others.
Fire and gunpowder can be as equally destructive as the Internet, perhaps more so in the wrong hands. Yet, we can’t dream of banning those things; wouldn’t work anyway if some government tried. Instead, we use them with wisdom and insight, aware of the dangers.
Yes, that’s it—I’m wanting to raise your awareness. When you use fire or weapons, you are careful. You take precautions. Well, when you surf the Net, you must act the same way!
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=numinous&o=1
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=numinous&o=1