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02/19/2010
Our Digital Nation, Part II
Another look at the PBS “Frontline” program of Feb. 2 titled “Digital Nation” and the distressing state of affairs when it comes to learning and our students. Following are a few thoughts from Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, founder and director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media. Frontline conducted an interview with Prof. Nass on Dec. 1, 2009. Nass has been examining multitasking… “looking at multiple media at the same time. So we’re not talking about people watching the kids and cooking and stuff like that. We’re talking about using information, multiple sources. And that is the part of everyone’s life that’s growing so rapidly.”
Frontline: What are the experiments that you’re doing today?
CN: Today we have people doing two experiments. The first one asks the question, can high and low multitaskers focus on something and not be distracted? Because one would think to multitask, you’d have to be good at ignoring distractions and going, “Oh, that’s important; that’s unimportant”….
The idea we’re looking at today is can high multitaskers ignore irrelevancy, which would seem to be very important.
[Ed. Professor Nass’ group then conducts various experiments using different shaped objects, colors, etc., with students asked to make observations about one while distracted by another… same with letters and numbers.]
Frontline: What did you expect when you started these experiments?
CN: Each of the three researchers on this project thought that…high multitaskers [would be] great at something, although each of us bet on a different thing.
I bet on filtering. I thought those guys are going to be experts at getting rid of irrelevancy. My second colleague thought it was going to be the ability to switch from one task to another. And the third of us looked at…keeping memory neatly organized. So we each had our own bets, but we all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something.
CN: We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.
CN: We’re troubled, because if you think about it, if on the one hand multitasking is growing not only across time, but in younger and younger kids we’re observing high levels of multitasking, if that is causing them to be worse at these fundamental abilities – I mean, think about it: Ignoring irrelevancy – that seems pretty darn important. Keeping your memory in your head nicely and neatly organized – that’s got to be good. And being able to go from one thing to another? Boy, if you’re bad at all of those, life looks pretty difficult.
And in fact, we’re starting to see some higher-level effects [of multitasking]. For example, recent work we’ve done suggests we’re worse at analytic reasoning, which of course is extremely valuable for school, for life, etc. So we’re very troubled about, on the one hand, the growth, and on the other hand, the essential incompetence or failure….
One would think that if people were bad at multitasking, they would stop. However, when we talk with the multitaskers, they seem to think they’re great at it and seem totally unfazed and totally able to do more and more and more. We worry about it, because as people become more and more multitaskers, as more and more people – not just young kids, which we’re seeing a great deal of, but even in the workplace, people being forced to multitask, we worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly….
And frankly, we’re seeing this across the world, from the least developed countries to the most developed countries. Multitasking is one of the most dominant trends in the use of media, so we could be essentially dumbing down the world. [emphasis mine]
CN: It’s very scary. And it’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about this research and why so many other people are getting excited.
People never bothered to look at what we call chronic multitaskers. What they would do is they’d make people do five things at once and say: “Ha ha! They’re not as good as if they do one thing at a time.” Not a big shock, I think. What we decided to do is ask the question, what’s happening if you’re doing this all the time, even when you’re not multitasking? So if we take a multitasker and say, “Now just focus on this,” can they? As a professor and as a teacher, we think a lot about how do you teach kids who can’t pay attention or are distracted by irrelevancy or don’t keep their memory neatly organized? It’s a scary, scary thought.
And, in fact, you already hear professors and others talking about changes in the way kids write, so that instead of writing an essay, they write in paragraphs, because what happens is, they write a paragraph, and they say, “Oh, now I’ll look at Facebook for a while.” Or they write a paragraph and say, “Oh, chance to play poker,” or whatever other activity they want, or to do all of these at once.
So what we’re seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through and much more little bursts and snippets. And we see that across media, across film, across, in Web sites, this idea of just do a little bit and then you can run away.
Frontline: We were at MIT, and we were interviewing students and professors. And the professors, by and large, were complaining that their students were losing focus because they were on their laptops during class, and the kids just all insisted that they were really able to manage all that media and still pay attention to what was important in class – pick and choose, as they put it. Does that sound familiar to you?
CN: It’s extremely familiar…And the truth is, virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big new items here, and one of the big discoveries is, you know what? You’re really lousy at it. And even though I’m at the university and tell my students this, they say: “Oh, yeah, yeah. But not me! I can handle it. I can manage all these,” which is, of course, a normal human impulse. So it’s actually very scary….
Frontline: [Are we actually changing our brains by multitasking all the time?]
CN: There’s a good chance. We don’t know for sure, because it also could be that people are born to multitask. That is, they’re born with the desire to do all these things, and that’s making them worse….
One of the other worries is, we’re seeing multitasking younger and younger and younger. So in a lovely study, someone showed that when infants were breastfeeding and the television was on, infants were doing a lot of television watching. Now, if we think about it, the way that we think that breastfeeding evolved the way it did is the distance from the mother’s face to the infant is the perfect focal distance. The voice is one that’s very attractive.
Well, if you think about it, what is television filled with? Faces and voices. What do babies love? Faces and voices. So now, at a time when we believe that children learn intense concentration, they’re being drawn away. Then as they get older, as they get to 3 or 4, we started feeling guilty that we put kids in front of the TV as a baby-sitter. So what did we do? We didn’t turn off the TV. We started giving them toys, books, etc., while they’re watching TV. So what are we telling them? We’re telling them, “Don’t pay attention; do many things at once.” Well, it may not then be surprising that years later, that’s how they view the media world.