Reclaiming Conversation (25 page)

Adam stays on the subject of why he sent that final email to Tessa.
When Tessa broke up with him he was plagued with self-doubt. Perhaps Tessa was right. Perhaps he was insufficiently empathic. “So, when I wanted to express my feelings to her and I thought I might be inadequate if I talked, I just went ahead and expressed my feelings in a way where I knew I would not fail: an email.” But the email failed miserably.All it provoked were more words designed to most hurt the other.

What have new media done to the communications of love? They have deepened them and given them new immediacy. But online, with an archive of messages on hand, we feel we know more than we really do about our partners. Online, we are more likely to say cruel things. Digital exchanges disinhibit when love might be better served by tact. Adam says that online messaging “allows you to be slightly warmer than in real life.” And then he adds that it also allows you to be “slightly crueler” as well.

Lovers have left each other insecure since the beginning of love. What I am struck with as I watch Adam juggling his phones and laptop is that when he wants to think about who he is and can be, he looks to his archive, beginning with the rapturous early messages “trapped” on his old phone. Indeed, Adam thinks the idea of a record was part of his relationship with Tessa from the very beginning.

Even when we were doing this, we knew we had a record. A record of our conversations. I think it is powerful. I reread the conversations all the time. . . . There's a permanence to it. We loved to talk on the phone, but sometimes . . . I wonder if one of the reasons that at some times we gravitated to this medium of conversation was . . . to be able to remember. . . . I treasure that permanence. . . . When she writes . . . “you are great,” she is saying “I have a need and you met it.” How central that is to have that written evidence, for the rest of my life in my Gmail . . . or to print it out if I want, whenever.

The archive affirms Adam—he sees the self he wants to be—but of course, he is aware that having the archive also “cuts the other way.” Adam says, “When she says in this medium ‘You are insufficient,' it's
devastating to read. . . . It wasn't just something she said at the height of a fight. It was, like, measured. There's a level of deliberation that's baked in.”

Adam thinks electronic communication helped him in this relationship because it allowed him time to craft his writing. But this means that Tessa's texts and messages were also crafted. This seems fairly straightforward, but Adam admits that this is not something he has thought much about. He has always liked to think of Tessa's messages as “straight from the heart”—more spontaneous than his own. But now, he says, “My mind is racing. I'm thinking, ‘Oh shit. . . . Maybe I shouldn't value [the emails] as much as I do. Maybe there is something more deliberate and insincere than I give credit for.'” Adam wonders if he is a prisoner of his archive and is moved to ask, “How do you know someone in a true
way?”

Attentional Disarray

I need to see who wants me. We are not as strong as technology's pull.

—A JUNIOR AT MIT, EXPLAINING WHY SHE CHECKS HER TEXTS DURING CLASS

From what I hear
, really good actors can actually teach really well.

—ANANT AGARWAL, CEO OF EDX, THE HARVARD/MIT CONSORTIUM ON ONLINE EDUCATION, CONTEMPLATING THE SUBSTITUTION OF ACTORS FOR PROFESSORS IN ONLINE COURSES

A
t MIT, I teach a seminar on science, technology, and memoir. Enrollment is capped at twenty students. The atmosphere is intimate. We read memoirs by scientists, engineers, and designers (one student favorite is Oliver Sacks's
Uncle Tungsten
) and then the students tell their own stories.

MIT students come from diverse backgrounds. Some have lived hardscrabble lives. During a recent fall semester, their stories were particularly poignant. One had escaped with his family from what was then the Soviet Union. Another had overcome deep poverty; there were many nights when he had no choice but to sleep in his car. And yet, through all of this, these students had found their way to science or engineering
or design. Sometimes the inspiration had come from a teacher, parent, or friend. Sometimes it came from fascination with an object—a broken-down car, an old computer, a grandfather clock. The students seemed to understand each other, to find a rhythm. I thought the class was working.

And then, halfway through the semester, a group of students asks to see me. They want to say that they have been texting during class and feel bad because of the very personal material being discussed. They say that they text in all their classes, but here, well, it somehow seems wrong. We decide that this is something the class should discuss as a group.

In that discussion, more students admit that they, too, text in class. A small group says they are upset to hear this. They have been talking about the roughest times of their childhoods, about abuse and abandonment. But even they admit that they see checking for texts during class as the norm and have since high school. But why in
this
class? It's a small seminar.
They are talking about their lives.

In the conversation that follows, my students portray constant connection as a necessity. These students don't feel they can be present unless they are also, in a way, absent. For some, three minutes is too long to go without checking their phones. Some say two minutes is their rule. Those who bring tablets to class point out that a “social check” is as simple as touching a Facebook icon on their screen. They want to see who is in touch with them, a comfort in itself.

We decide to try a device-free class with a short break to check phones. For me, something shifts. Conversations become more relaxed and cohesive. Students finish their thoughts, unrushed. What the students tell me is that they feel relief: When they are not tempted by their phones, they feel more in control of their attention. An irony emerges. For of course, on one level, we all see our phones as instruments for giving us greater control, not less.

My students became upset because, in this class, their usual split attention (looking at their phones; listening to their classmates) felt wrong. It devalued their classmates' life stories (and their own) and made them
feel that they were crossing some moral line. They could imagine a day when people around you would be upset and you would still be pulled away to your phone.

A lot is at stake in attention. Where we put it is not only how we decide what we will learn; it is how we show what we value.

T
hese days, attention is in short supply—in college classrooms, its scarcity poses special problems because, after all, so much money, time, and effort has been spent to bring together these students, this professor, these educational resources. And yet here, like everywhere, if we have a device in our hands, we want to multitask.

But in this, we pursue an illusion. When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving quickly from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task
we add to the mix
. Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse. We've seen that not only do multitaskers have trouble deciding
how to organize their time
, but over time, they “forget” how to read human emotions. Students—for example, my students—think that texting during class does not interrupt their understanding of class conversation, but they are wrong. The myth of multitasking is just that: a myth.

And yet, multitasking is the norm in classrooms. By 2012, nine in ten college students
said that they text
in class.

The widespread adoption of texting was a landmark in the unfolding of the multitasked life. We've met the group of high school seniors in Connecticut for whom getting a smartphone over the 2008 holiday break made the spring term that followed it a new kind of experience: When these students are at school, in class and out of class, they text continually. There is so much texting during school hours that their school put a “no texting in class” policy into effect, but the young men
ignore it: Some claim to have never heard of it. Andrew says, “Most kids can text without looking, so . . . you'll just be looking at the teacher, and under the table you've got your thumbs going crazy.”

One of the more studious boys in the group, Oliver, takes pains to insist that his teachers should not take it personally when he texts in class. Teachers put the notes online; he “gets” what is going on in class, so “I'm almost always bored and I want to be somewhere else and I'm almost always texting
.
” He does admit that once he's texting, the possibilities for concentrating are pretty much gone: “You can't focus on the thing you are doing when you are sending the text . . . or waiting to receive a text . . . there is so much going on with other things you might want to receive on your phone.”

Despite his new problem with focus, even in 2008, Oliver expects that what he has now is what he'll have in the future. He imagines that from now on, when he feels bored, he will immediately add a new layer of communication. So for him, “boredom is a thing of the past.” Every generation, he says, had its own way of responding to being bored, especially during classes. Other generations passed notes, doodled, or zoned out. His generation can send texts and go to Facebook. He calls his generation “lucky”: “We have the awesome new power to erase boredom.”

His friend Aidan disagrees. He thinks that this “awesome new power” means they have all lost focus. Maybe Oliver isn't bored, but has he noticed that none of them are paying attention in class?

When they went on to college, this early smartphone generation did not grow more tolerant of what they are so quick to call boredom. We've met Judy, whom I interview when she is a college junior. A slow moment in class sends her immediately to her phone, where she goes through the “circuit” of all of her social apps, just to check them. She says that she likes the feeling of “rapid-fire switching” and thinks that no class could ever compete with it, no matter how engaging. Why? The class “is only one mode of stimulus.”

So, dropping out of a classroom conversation can begin with a moment of boredom, because a friend reaches out to you, or because, as one
student in my memoir class put it, “You just want to see who wants you.” And once you are in that “circuit of apps,” you want to stay with them.

In classrooms, the distracted are a distraction: Studies show that
when students are in class multitasking
on laptops, everyone around them learns less. One college senior says, “I'll be in a great lecture and look over and see someone shopping for shoes and think to myself, ‘Are you kidding me?' So I get mad at them, but then I get mad at myself for being self-righteous. But after I've gone through my cycle of indignation to self-hate, I realize that I have missed a minute of the lecture, and then I'm really mad.”

It's easy to see how concentration would be disrupted in this crucible of emotion. But even for those who don't get stirred up, when you see someone in your class on Facebook or checking their email, two things cross your mind: Maybe this class is boring, and maybe I, too, should attend to some online business. Yet despite research that shows that multitasking is bad for learning, the myth of the moment is still that multitasking is a good idea.
A series of ads
for AT&T show a young man chatting with a group of schoolchildren about the things children know. Or perhaps, the things children know that adults want to validate. One of the things that the children and the adult agree on is that faster is better. A second is that it is better to do more than one thing at a time. This is a myth that dies hard.

And we are not inclined to let it die because multitasking feels good. It is commonplace to talk about multitaskers as addicted. I don't like to talk about addiction in this context because I find that discussing the holding power of technology in these terms makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel they are facing something against which resistance seems almost futile. This is a fallacy. In this case, resistance is not futile but highly productive. Writers, artists, scientists, and literary scholars talk openly about disenabling the Wi-Fi on their computers in order to get creative work done. In the acknowledgments of her most recent book,
the novelist Zadie Smith
thanks Freedom and SelfControl, programs that shut off connectivity on her Mac.

The analogy between screens and drugs breaks down for other reasons. There is only one thing that you should do if you are on heroin: Get off the heroin. Your life is at stake. But laptops and smartphones are not things to remove.
They are facts of life and part of our creative lives. The goal is to use them with greater intention.

Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don't always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it's up to us to promote “unitasking.”

It's encouraging that it is often children who recognize their vulnerabilities to technology and come up with ways to deal with them, even when adults are pulling them in another direction. In fact, the critique of multitasking is a good example of where I've seen children take the lead. Reyna, fourteen, has been issued an iPad at school. The entire eighth-grade curriculum is on it. But so are her email and favorite games, including
Candy Crush
. In order to get work done, she prints out her reading assignments and puts aside the iPad. She learned to do this from her sister, who had experienced the same attention problems with a curriculum-on-a-tablet. Reyna describes the problem:

People really liked [the iPad] because . . . they could look things up really quickly in class, but also . . . people were getting really distracted. Like, my sister had an iPad and she said that her and her friends' texts were blocked but they had school emails. And they would sit in class and pretend to be researching but really they were emailing back and forth just because they were bored—or they would take screenshots of a test practice sheet and send it out to their friends that hadn't had the class yet.

But my sister also said that even when she and her friends were just trying to study for a test, “they would go and print everything that they had on their iPads,” because studying was made a lot more difficult
because of all the other distractions on the iPad, all the other apps they could download.

This student knows that it is hard to concentrate in class when you are holding a device that you associate with games and messaging—a device built to encourage doing one thing and then another and another. Reyna came to her experience with the iPad at school with many advantages: She had experienced school without it. She remembered that she used to be less distracted. She had a point of comparison and she had her sister as a mentor. But increasingly, students like Reyna are the exception. Children who begin school with an iPad won't know that you can “force” a state of greater concentration by using media that allow you to do only one thing at a time. It's up to a more experienced generation to teach them.

Students who print out their assignments in order to have time away from screens should give educators pause when they, with the best of intentions, try to make things more efficient by closing the library and declaring books obsolete.

M
any educators begin with an accommodation: They note that students text and search the web in class, and they say, “Fine”—in previous days, students would find other ways to zone out, and this is the twenty-first-century equivalent. But some educators do more than accommodate the distractions of digital media. They see a new sensibility of fractured attention and they want to use it as an opportunity to teach in a new way.

So, literary theorist Katherine Hayles argues that fractured attention is the sensibility of the twenty-first century and that to look back to “deep attention” in the classroom is
to be unhelpfully nostalgic
. (My skepticism begins here, as I think of Reyna and her sister, who print out
their reading assignments so as not to be distracted on the iPad.) Students, says Hayles, think in a new mode, the mode of “hyper attention.” Given the realities of the classroom, educators have a choice: “Change the students to fit the educational environment or
change that environment to fit the students
.”

In other words, for Hayles, there is no real choice. Education must embrace the culture of hyper attention. As an example of a constructive way to do this, Hayles points to experiments at the University of Southern California in a classroom outfitted with screens.