I firmly agree. And I have been agreeing with Marche for some time while continually monitoring and adjusting my own techy habits in order that I not acquiesce too much of what I understand as my own humanness. I pause occasionally, looking where to push back, as society relentlessly bombards my life with newer and more fantastic modes of speeding up processes and making tedious, logistical activities less physically rigorous.
Marche's article became a centerpiece for discussion in one of my high school English units on technology. I prefer to jump start each classroom, each school year with this unit because I recognize that I am not an LED screen. And as a consequence of my inability to light up--except with an occasional smile--I have to lay weighty groundwork with students in order to compete for their chronically wandering attention. I push students to consider and possibly appreciate the impact technology is having on their own lives, including how they think, learn, and interact with other people--including me. I challenge them to integrate into our experience (theirs with me) the relevancy of the differences between the ways we grew up respectively, and how that affects my expectations as compared to their needs individually, as well as collectively.
I begin with this,
When I was your age, we still stood up and walked to change television channels, one click at a time. We chose from four major channels, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. We played video games at the arcade on a Saturday after we walked with our friends, through a dirt field, to the mall. My dad bought our first VCR in 1985, and gratefully and finally, I could tape music videos from Michael Jackson's Thriller and Prince's Purple Rain. We had no CDs. We had no DVDs. We had no cell phones or email. We had two phones in the house and they were both connected to a cord and a wall. We turned a wheel to dial a number and if someone was on the line the caller heard a busy signal. We wound our clocks for an alarm and watched film on reel-to-reel projectors or at the movie theatre. Our earliest computers were video games and we had no Internet. I finally explain to them how cutting edge I thought I was when I purchased, then had shipped to me as an undergrad, my electric Brother typewriter in 1987.
They gasp and swear Omygod all through my cataloging. They laugh too. That denigrating laugh: your life must have suCKed. I blurt a defensive nO! We had beautiful days. They don't believe me. One or two will bravely respond, well sure you did... and here's why______________. Then I ask them all to imagine how we got along each day and compare it with their own daily living. That's when the rich comparisons begin.
I continue to shift the talk to their lives and introduce Frontline's presentation, Digital Nation (2010). The students (of all high school levels) dedicate their full attention to the front of the room as producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing Up Online) joins Douglass Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool) in an exploration of digital natives, kids like my own children who have never been taught to navigate with a mouse or to type, but somehow do it well. Dretzin and Rushkoff look at some of the effects of lifelong interactions with LED screens. The video, streamed into my classroom then projected onto the wall via my complicated network of connectors, adaptors, computers, and booming speakers, opens with vignettes of young people of varied ages, hues of humanity and education levels, sitting alone or with others, but nonetheless hunched over and glaring intently at a variety of LED screens. My students immediately see themselves, then pick up on the video's salient look at a Stanford study on the futility of multi-tasking. I pause and ask students how many different screens can they properly manage at once. The top scorer five: email, television, texting, a social media network, and another tab of homework, my required blog on the computer. Our top scorer beams at her achievement. But not for long.
The film transitions to a study, conducted by Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass with colleagues Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner in 2009, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a rare look into the effects of technology. Studies on technology are rare because as laid out in Digital Nation, by the time the proposal and funding process for technology studies mature, the technology meant for study becomes as obsolete as a flip phone. The technology continues to evolve exponentially, yet a few of its effects are constant and quantifiable. Technology encourages multitasking. And unfortunately, studies have unequivocally shown that multi-taskers, while they believe they are doing quite well, become less effective at multiple levels of valued cognitive processes. The research says that those "people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time." (Gorlick) Many remember the "Your Brain on Google" (UCLA, 2009) study which suggested that an internet search stimulates one's brain counter to the way reading a text does. News reports touted the findings. A Google search MRI shows an increase in brain activity when compared to what a brain looks like when one is reading a book. When first published researchers concluded the Google search MRI an improvement over the text reading MRI. But in Digital Nation, those same researchers, Small , Moody, Siddarth, and Bookheimer, revise their initial findings, suggesting instead that more activity in specific areas of the brain does not indicate cognitive strength or improvement. They suggest their findings may in review, indicate more an effect similar to the initial increased energy output necessary for running or lifting weights: the more you exercise the muscle, the less energy you expend in achieving goals. Therefore, the higher level of brain activity reflected in the Google search MRI indicated more activity as opposed to better or more quality activity. The reading MRI indicates a more calm, focused thinking experience. When exposed to more digital activity, and in this case Internet search activity, thinking becomes more frenetic, less focused. I do not exaggerate the hard repeated task teachers take on daily in trying to even focus the eyesights of students who are accustomed to scanning a page circularly as opposed to reading it left to right, linearly. I cannot get most of my ninth grade students to read directions. They do not focus.
The video continues as other experts, students, college professors and parents discuss how digitally immersed minds become more prone to engaging novelty as opposed to more meaningful and challenging thinking tasks. In other words, the multi-tasking built into digital activity promotes the skimming of surfaces, tangential commentary, loose associations. Look to the endless unedited banter so prevalent among today's young as evidence. And dare ask one who is chronically connected and she/he may well express the opposite opinion. She may have bought what has been sold by technology pushers: the more we do, the better off we are. The more windows we have open (in the form of LED screens) the more we can see, and the wider our scope of knowledge. But contrarily, and logically, the more LED screens we have open, interact with, rely upon, relegate to, become isolated with, the more screen-like we become: flat, rigid, bland, predictable, cold, apathetic, and unable to reflect upon ourselves. Soulless.
As a teacher and as an adult having lived through the arch from analog to digital, I am mourning the death of complex, methodical finished thoughts in my life. I mourn the death of similar relationships. When Stephan Marche asks, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" I read his us as me. I read lonely as secure in false connectivity, unconsciously projected insecurity, encouraged conspicuous consumption, relinquished dignified privacy, elicited envy, and complete complicity. In essence, after disconnecting from my digital life almost completely, I realized that I had been engaged in an outrageous conversation with myself and my fellows which reflected an inauthenticity I conned myself into believing real. And I am almost ashamed to admit it. How many "likes" did I get for that posted idea? How many commented on the beauty of my photo? How many friends have I collected now?
When I first encountered Facebook, I loved it. I loved the reconnection with so many old faces and distant family members. I found out what happened to so and so. It was unbelievable. I thought it genius. And that felt good. I stayed connected to see the kids and have short conversations with folks I genuinely missed having around. It felt almost like they were actually around. Then it changed.
My real world intermingled with this netherworld. People I didn't really know became a silent circle of friends acted as a buttress between me and my often challenging daily life. I got hooked. I would make pronouncements to them what I held back from my own true familiars. They would reply with the sorts of encouragements you get from the therapist or the preacher or the coach. And I loved it.
I began to loop between my real life and real conversations to check what others were saying about my posts. I multitasked my own life, my own friends and family looking for the approval of people I barely knew. My life and my thinking, my being and my living became less meaningful as I engaged in a pretend electronic world similar to one led by the focus of Marche's article, a former Playboy Playmate (and I am no former Playboy Playmate) who died alone in her Los Angeles apartment after over 881 tweets to her adoring fans. Yvette Vickers had no real social network of family or friends who may have noticed her absence; her Twitter and facebook fans were all electronic with no tangible connection to her life. And sadly, Vickers was discovered by a neighbor, mummified on the floor with her computer still humming. The neighbor only thought to investigate after noticing her Vickers' mail and newspapers piling up, turning yellow on her porch.
On the subject of loneliness and isolation, Marche turns to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, who explains, “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness." Accordingly, time spent pursuing imagined intimacy and connection is a waste of our most valuable commodity. Our human experience must be meaningful and algorithm-proof. It must be fleshy and awkward. It must be sloppy and uncomfortable and smelly. It must be laughable and private and complicated and sometimes hard. Again, fleshy.
My real world intermingled with this netherworld. People I didn't really know became a silent circle of friends acted as a buttress between me and my often challenging daily life. I got hooked. I would make pronouncements to them what I held back from my own true familiars. They would reply with the sorts of encouragements you get from the therapist or the preacher or the coach. And I loved it.
I began to loop between my real life and real conversations to check what others were saying about my posts. I multitasked my own life, my own friends and family looking for the approval of people I barely knew. My life and my thinking, my being and my living became less meaningful as I engaged in a pretend electronic world similar to one led by the focus of Marche's article, a former Playboy Playmate (and I am no former Playboy Playmate) who died alone in her Los Angeles apartment after over 881 tweets to her adoring fans. Yvette Vickers had no real social network of family or friends who may have noticed her absence; her Twitter and facebook fans were all electronic with no tangible connection to her life. And sadly, Vickers was discovered by a neighbor, mummified on the floor with her computer still humming. The neighbor only thought to investigate after noticing her Vickers' mail and newspapers piling up, turning yellow on her porch.
On the subject of loneliness and isolation, Marche turns to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, who explains, “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness." Accordingly, time spent pursuing imagined intimacy and connection is a waste of our most valuable commodity. Our human experience must be meaningful and algorithm-proof. It must be fleshy and awkward. It must be sloppy and uncomfortable and smelly. It must be laughable and private and complicated and sometimes hard. Again, fleshy.
Our experience must be deeper and richer than a Google search. Less bifurcated. Less whimsical. Living through digital screens is no living at all. A yellow sun breaking against a blackened sky is more breathtaking when shared silently with one good friend than with 30 sort of good friends (about ten of whom are real friends), 20 family members, 2 children, 30 work mates and 700 vaguely remembered acquaintances. And quite honestly, my very closest friends do not use Facebook or even own a television.
Yesterday, I sat with a group of friends and listened to one, Fall, who works in the technology industry. She works for a huge technology conglomerate and has worked for them her entire adult life. She explains, "I was on the Internet before it was even available to the public." Fall nearly leaps out of her chair as we talk about social networking and the Internet. "It's all fake. It's designed to get you eventually to feel bad about yourself, to feel inadequate and to want more and more stuff. It is someone else's design for your life. Every time you interact with a screen, that's what's supposed to happen."
"I know," I say.
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