Reclaiming Conversation (26 page)

One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”: While a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the web for appropriate content to display on the screens—for example, sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary
on the material being presented
.

There is no doubt that Google jockeying speaks to our moment. Students say that they want to turn away from class when there is a lull. Google jockeying implicitly says, all right, we will get rid of those lulls. Even experienced faculty start to ramp up their PowerPoint presentations in a spirit (not always acknowledged) of competing with students' screens. Or we tell them, as Hayles suggests, to go to the web during class time for opposing views, images, and comments. Or to make a comment of their own.

But there is another way to respond to students who complain that they need more stimulation than class conversation provides. It is to tell them that a moment of boredom can be an opportunity to go inward to your imagination, an opportunity for new thinking.

If a moment of boredom happens in a classroom, rather than competing for student attention with ever more extravagant technological fireworks (
Google jockeying!
), we should encourage our students to stay with their moment of silence or distraction. We can try to build their confidence that such moments—when you stay with your thoughts—have a
payoff. We can present classrooms as places where you can encounter a moment of boredom and “walk” toward its challenges. A chemistry professor puts it this way: “In my class I want students to daydream. They can go back to the text if they missed a key fact. But if they went off in thought . . . they might be making the private connection that pulls the course together for them.”

When those who are fluent in both deep attention and hyper attention—and certainly Hayles is in this group—look at hyper attention, it is tempting to see something exciting because it is new. But they still have a choice. They can switch between ways of knowing. But children who grow up in an all-multitasking environment may not have a choice.

A life of multitasking limits your options so that you cannot simply “pick up” deep attention. What is most enriching is having fluency in both deep and hyper attention. This is attentional pluralism and it should be our educational goal. You can choose multitasking. You can also focus on one thing at a time. And you know when you should.

But attentional pluralism is hard to achieve. Hyper attention feels good. And without practice, we can lose the ability to summon deep attention.

Eric Schmidt, of Google, spoke to a college audience and expressed his own concern. He told the students that he used to read books on airplanes, the one place where there was no Wi-Fi. Now, with Wi-Fi on airplanes, things have changed: “Now I spend all my time being online, doing my emails, interacting and all that, and the book doesn't get read. I think
we've got to work on that
.” Schmidt made this comment while promoting a book he authored that celebrates, even in its subtitle,
how technology will “reshape” people
. Schmidt isn't happy that he has exchanged books for email and messages, but he believes in the forward march of technology.

Elizabeth, a graduate student in economics, is not so sure about the forward march. She is convinced that the “natural multitasking” of her work life has left her with diminished cognitive capacity.

Before graduate school, Elizabeth worked as a consultant. It was a job that led her to make multitasking a way of life. “For instance, I could be
fielding emails from clients, looking up industry data to insert into a PowerPoint presentation for an urgent meeting, researching which restaurant to take my best friend to that night, while writing the actual requirements document I was supposed to be working on that day. My routine practice of multitasking led to another behavior—skimming.” It was only when Elizabeth returned to the university that she saw the full effect of years spent multitasking, a life lived in hyper attention. Now, as a graduate student, she has been assigned an excerpt of Plato's
Republic
for an ethics class.

I had skimmed the chapter, as was my habit, then, realizing that I hadn't retained much, reread it again and even made a few notes. Unfortunately, on the day of the class, I did not have that notebook with me, and while I remembered the overall gist of the chapter (moderation—good; desire for luxury—bad), I struggled to recall specific ideas expressed in it. Without access to my cell phone to refer to the article or read up on Plato on Wikipedia, I wasn't able to participate in the class discussion. Having access to information is always wonderful, but without having at least some information retained in my brain, I am not able to build on those ideas or connect them together to form new ones.

As I speak with Elizabeth, it is clear that more is at stake than disappointment in her class performance. If she can't “build on ideas or connect them together to form new ones,” she knows she won't be able to have certain kinds of conversations—in her view, probably the most important ones.

And attention is not a skill we learn for one domain. When you train your brain to multitask as your basic approach—when you embrace hyper attention—you won't be able to focus even when you want to. So, you're going to have trouble sitting and listening to your children tell you about their day at school. You're going to have trouble at work sitting in a meeting and listening to your colleagues. Their narrative will seem painfully slow. Just as middle school children don't acquire the skills for conversation because they lack practice, university students lose the
capacity to sit in a class and follow a complex argument. Research shows that when college students watch online educational videos, they watch for six minutes no matter how long the video. So videos for online courses
are being produced at six minutes
. But if you become accustomed to getting your information in six-minute bites, you will grow impatient with more extended presentations. One college senior describes her friends' taste for the short and terse: “If they had their choice, conversations would begin with a tweet and end in a tweet.”

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, had long observed students' fractured attention spans but did not feel personally implicated until one evening when she sat down to read
The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse, one of her favorite authors. Wolf found it impossible to focus on the book. She panicked and wondered if her life on the web had cost her this ability. When Eric Schmidt noted his difficulty with sustained reading, he remarked, “We've got to work on that.” Wolf immediately got to work. She began to study what skimming, scanning, and scrolling do to our ability to read with deep attention—
what she calls “deep reading
.” Her thesis is that a life lived online makes deep attention harder to summon. This happens because the brain is plastic—it is constantly in flux over a lifetime—so it “rewires” itself
depending on how attention is allocated
.

Wolf, Hayles, and Schmidt have all diagnosed a problem with deep attention. But they turn in different directions when it comes to what to do next. Hayles argues for a conscious pedagogical accommodation to the new sensibility. Schmidt shrugs and says that in the end, technology will lead us in the right direction. Wolf's focus on the plasticity of the brain gives her a different perspective. For if the brain is plastic, this means that at any age, it can be set to work on deep attention. Put otherwise, if we decide that deep attention is a value, we can cultivate it. Indeed, that is what Wolf discovered for herself. She had trouble with the Hesse but kept at it. And she says that after two weeks of effort, she was once again able to focus sufficiently to immerse herself in deep reading. Wolf's experience suggests a pedagogy that supports unitasking and deep reading. But if we value these, we have to actively choose them.

H
ayles is not alone in her enthusiasm for hyper attention. In
Born Digital
, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser describe in glowing terms
a new style of learner
who picks up things here and there, taking bits and pieces from a Wikipedia article, a clip from Comedy Central, a Twitter feed, the results of a Google search. In general, these new learners read headlines and gaze at images; they tinker and associate. They graze. When they need to go deep, they pause and dive. Palfrey and Gasser argue that there is no reason to think that an older generation, trained to gather information by focusing on several trusted sources read in depth, had a better learning style. It was just different.

But in practice, grazing makes it hard to develop a narrative to frame events, for example, to think about history or current events. The problem can sometimes begin with something as simple as not knowing the names of the actors in the drama. An eleventh grade teacher puts it this way: “My students are struggling. No dates, no geography, no sense of how to weigh the importance of things.”

The problem isn't web surfing. It's turning to bits and pieces at times when a more sustained narrative, the kind you are more likely to meet in a book or long article, would be a better choice.
This teacher is saying that her
students don't have the materials in mind to consider the whole and so they have trouble arguing a point of view.
But they continue to skip what this teacher calls “basic content,” thinking that this is something the web will fill them in on—someday.
The web is their “information prosthetic
” and they see no cost to having one.

We have met Maureen, thirty-two, who feels that without her phone she “doesn't have anything to say.” Maureen compares herself to her mother, who knew poetry by heart. Maureen knows no poetry; more than this, in school, she says, she was never asked to memorize anything, “no dates or places in history.” When she needed a fact, she looked it up online. This leaves Maureen feeling empty without her phone. But when she has her phone, she has facts at her fingertips but no timeline or
narrative to slide them into. For her, another fact about the United States in 1863 simply floats free in its own universe, somewhere out there in the cloud; it is not added to a story about the Civil War that Maureen already knows.

When I talk to high school and college students today, I see a lot of Maureens in the making, students confident they will always have their phones if they need to look something up, and who will perhaps someday regret their lack of “context.” For now, teachers in middle and high school are left trying to make a case for why students should be asked to remember people, places, chronology—the story. And why they should slow down.

I
run a focus group on technology in education for twenty teachers and administrators from independent high schools in the Northeast. They worry that their students are in a rush. Here are some of the thoughts around the table: “They don't think anything should take time.” “They are not particularly interested in listening to each other. If they have a question, they want the right answer. Quickly!” They want that answer directly and “don't understand the idea of a process.” Ideas should appear with the immediacy of search results: “They don't appreciate how an argument develops and sometimes needs to take side paths and turns.”

And the teachers don't think that what they call “the cult of PowerPoint” has served their students well. As early as elementary school, many of their students have been allowed to substitute PowerPoint presentations for writing assignments such as book reports. Bullet points help you organize your ideas, certainly, but
the presentation carries its own way of thinking
, one that values speed and simplicity.

By the end of the focus group, there is some consensus about next steps: These educators think their schools need more classroom time where students present opinions, hear the objections of others, and are asked to refine their ideas. They need practice making and defending an
argument. In other words, their students need more time talking to each other, face-to-face.

And even if every one of their students will always have the web by their side, these educators insist that on-demand information does not make an education. You need to have a strong background of facts and concepts on board
before
you know you need them. We think with what we know; we use what we know to ask new questions. As they make this point, I think of Maureen. She wants more facts for “context.” She wants more “things to think with.” That's what her mother's poems represent to her. Her mother had ownership of more ideas.

A similar concern about using the web to provide just-in-time information shows up among physicians arguing the future of medical education. Increasingly, and particularly while making a first diagnosis, physicians rely on handheld databases,
what one philosopher calls “E-memory
.” The physicians type in symptoms and the digital tool recommends a potential diagnosis and suggested course of treatment. Eighty-nine percent of medical residents regard one of these E-memory tools, UpToDate, as
their first choice for answering clinical questions
. But will this “just-in-time” and “just enough” information teach young doctors to organize their
own
ideas and draw their
own
conclusions?

Quick, accurate judgments depend on
having internalized an extensive library of facts. If you come to rely on E-memory, you may not take the time to build up your own. More than this, you may stop feeling you have to.

Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor of medicine at Tufts University, notes that
doctors used to build their own
internal database by reading and organizing the contents of medical journals. For Kassirer, the un-directedness of that learning was a feature, not a bug—an asset, not a problem. Kassirer stresses that in medicine, “we don't always know what we need to know, and searches that are constrained to information we need at a given moment may not generate
information that may be critically useful later
.” Searches return what we ask for—that's what they are made to do. When we depend on E-memory we lose that wide, unfiltered array of information that creates the conditions needed for
creativity, for serendipity. Nicholas Carr broadens the concern about search and memory when he says, “To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.
Outsource memory, and culture withers
.”