“Amazon, Gmail, I’ve seen all sorts of shopping, I’ve seen eBay. You name it, I’ve seen it,” says Dr. Stephen Luczycki.

What has Dr. Luczycki, a medical director in a surgical intensive care unit, seen?  He’s seen doctors, nurses and technicians in operating rooms using their smartphones and computers to text their friends, check their emails, and bid on eBay while a surgery was in progress. “This phenomenon has set off an intensifying discussion at hospitals and medical schools about a problem perhaps best described as ‘distracted doctoring’,” writes Matt Richtel in the New York Times.  “My gut feeling is lives are in danger,” says another doctor who wrote a recent article about “electronic distraction” in a medical journal.

A few days after writing about electronic distraction in the operating room, Richtel turned his attention to the growing national debate over phone addiction in automobiles, a growing cause of death, maiming and mayhem on the road. At any give moment, a study discloses,  660,000 drivers are holding phones to their ears.

These are but a few symptoms of a troubling decline in the attention span of our populace. We have become a distracted society, and what should be of deep concern to parents and educators is the effect that this collective malaise is having on our children. If adults cannot handle their media addiction, why would anyone think that children can? There is evidence that they can’t.

One significant manifestation is the glorification of computer screens as an educational tool. Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction, notes that “people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.” 

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain….My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

“The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection,” Professor Wolf writes, “are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.“

“Techno-addiction is creating a generation of students with hypertrophied thumbs and atrophied intellects,” we wrote not long ago (Digital Distractions Producing a Generation of Morons?). The Times‘s Richtel has been hammering on this theme for  some time (in particular read his cogent article Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction) As our homes and schools become more and more committed to the romance the computer screen we need to pay attention to the warnings Richtel has been marshaling.

Can our addiction to media be cured? In a Sunday New York Times editorial, “The Joy of of Quiet“, Pico Iyer writes, “The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.”

Immersion into beauty, meaning and tranquility. It’s a start.

Richard Curtis

For some time we’ve been wringing our hands about the potentially deleterious effect of e-books on children. Our concerns were provoked by studies that the distracting nature of screen devices have a negative impact on kids’ ability to concentrate and retain information.  And the jury is still out on e-textbooks.  (See Digital Distractions Producing a Nation of Morons?)

However, there’s some promising news that as a vehicle for pure pleasure-reading, e-books are becoming a big hit with children.  We have the New York Times‘s publishing-beat reporter Julie Bosman to thank for this ray of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy forecast.

In E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks Bosman quotes editors like Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books: “Adult fiction is hot, hot, hot, in e-books, and now it seems that teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot.” And Jon Anderson, publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing: “Boy, a lot of kids got e-readers for Christmas…If it follows the same trend as adults, it’s the start of an upward curve.” And Matthew Shear, publisher of St. Martin’s Press: “The young adults and the teenagers are now the newest people who are beginning to experience e-readers.If they get hooked, it’s great stuff for the business.”

So, instead of asking sociologists and psychiatrists about the effects of e-books on young minds, maybe we should be asking…kids?

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Techno-addiction is creating a generation of students with hypertrophied thumbs and  atrophied intellects. That seems to be the gist of Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction by Matt Richtel of the New York Times.  They may be dazzling multi-taskers but many cannot read, write, or calculate.

This comes as no surprise here, where we’ve posted a number of articles warning about the potentially destructive allure of screens (see below). But as the first fully wired crop of youngsters comes on stream the harmful impact of digital technology on academic performance is manifesting itself with a vengeance.

“The risk,” Richtel reports, “is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.”  He quotes Michael Rich, executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston: “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing… The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

The article focuses on a California student described as one of his school’s brightest. His digital skills and passion for videos earned him an A in film critique.  But he also got a D+ in English and an F in Algebra II, netting him a grade point average of 2.3. It took him two months to read 43 pages of an assigned book last summer. Nor has he gotten much exercise. The senior says “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year.” Books? He prefers YouTube, where “you can get a whole story in six minutes. A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”  And just how well does he handle multitasking? In fact, even that’s a problem: “I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age. Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”

Another student, who exchanges 27,000 text messages every month (!!!), reflects the same inability to focus on task: “I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

Researchers confirm what these stories tell us: “Several recent studies,” Richtel writes, “show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families.”

A teacher puts it more plainly: “It’s a catastrophe.”

Read Matt Richtel’s Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction. And for additional background about the negative  impact of screen technology see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Another study confirms our suspicions that reading books on computer or e-book screens compromises learning and retention. Experiments with children and college students have pointed to the conclusion that screen media are more distracting than their paper counterparts.

Now a study conducted by product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group has quantified these conjectures. Participants were asked to read some stories by Ernest Hemingway in printed form and on a variety of e-reading devices: an iPad, a Kindle and a desktop PC.

The results, as reported by Lauren Indvik of Mashable, were eye-opening: reading speeds were 6.2% slower on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle. “Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast,” Indvik writes.  Comprehension suffered, too, especially on the PC, where readers complained that it “reminded readers of work.”

The sampling was modest – 24 participants  (Indvik says that “10 is about average for a usability survey”) – and is far from conclusive. But the indications are ominous. “I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed,” says Indvik. This comes just as schools and governments consider switching from paper to e-textbooks. See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

For further reading see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction, More Evidence that Screens=Distraction, and Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade).

Richard Curtis

Are you operating with Mind 2.0 or are you still slouching around with Yesterday’s Mind?

“Yesterday’s Mind” is actually a pithy phrase from a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Carr’s viewpoint, as reported by Steven Johnson in the New York Times, is that “the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.”

We’ve been saying the same thing in our postings (See Yet More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) but after reading Johnson’s article we’re not quite so cocksure.  Maybe we need to revisit shallow thinking, the kind we presumably do when we’re multitasking or reading a book onscreen, and learn if we’re missing something.

Johnson’s arguments are pretty convincing.  “I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions,” he admits “but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.”

He’s right. Rocket science is not an individual activity but a social one. Though scientists may get their inspiration from solitary hikes in the hills or angling alone in a rowboat on a remote pond, the development of their ideas comes from interaction with colleagues. “Many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise.”

Perhaps that’s why the old publishing business is stuck: its denizens are saddled with “linear, literary minds” (Carr’s phrase) that are wedded to solitary, immersive reading and learning and they have not noticed that a new generation is more comfortable being part of a group mind that performs a lot of tasks that used to be solitary, like reading books. A good example is a Kindle feature called “popular highlights”, which underlines phrases in a book that fellow readers have highlighted as being particularly meaningful. Now you can see, absorb, and be influenced by what others feel is inspiring. A kind of Zagat’s Guide for your brain.

Johnson’s conclusion? “Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television. And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.”

The key word is “marginally”.  We’ll take “marginally” to avoid being ostracized for suffering from YMS – Yesterday’s Mind Syndrome. But if the tradeoff leaves us truly shallow, we’ll simply have to take our linear, literary brain and immerse it in a good, printed, book.

Here’s Johnson’s article in full: Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

[Reader: if you don't think Screens = Distraction, here's a test: how many times in the course of reading this article do you look away from the text? And how much information do you retain?]

TMI – Too Much Information – can be embarrassing. It can also be destructive.

That’s the conclusion reached by researchers in studies of media use. “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” a neuroscientist is quoted by Matt Richtel in a major in in-depth article in the New York Times, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive,” Richtel writes, “research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress… Even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

These findings reinforce concerns we’ve expressed here (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) about potentially negative effects of screen-learning on young minds. Experiments demonstrate that children using computers were far more easily distracted and unable to retain information than their paper-reading counterparts.

Now, however, the same effects are manifesting themselves in adults. Richtel’s must-read examination of the impact of technology on mental processes, reveals that we consume 12 hours of media daily, compared to five hours fifty years ago. But it’s not just the amount of time we spend in front of a screen, it’s the quality of that time that is taking its toll on every aspect of daily life. Though the analogy of addiction has frequently been used to describe media technology fixation, the addiction is closer to food and sex than to drugs and alcohol, says a leading brain scientist, because too much of a good thing – food, sex, information – is inimical to health, safety, and human relationships. What Richtel calls information bursts “play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive”

Infatuation with computers, e-books and tablets can blind us to the downside of the technology, and it’s good that revelations such as those Richtel reports have begun to come out now when we need to achieve a balance between benefits and liabilities.

If you think these conclusions don’t apply to you, click here for a test.

Richard Curtis

Her: I read a wonderful book the other day.
Him: On what?
Her: On relationships
Him: No, I mean on what device did you read it? Kindle? Nook? Sony? iPad?
Her: Kindle. Anyway, this book said some really important things about how couples communicate.
Him: Kindle? You could probably see an enhanced version with all kinds of extras on the iPad. Is it audio enabled?`
Her: I don’t know. Would you like to know what the author said about listening to the other person?
Him: Will I be able to see it on YouTube? Hey, why are you packing your suitcase?

This sad exchange might be cited by Deborah Tannen if she ever decided to update You Just Don’t Understand, her insightful book describing how difficult it is for men and women to communicate with each other.  The “Her” in the story was talking about what interested her (her relationship with Him) and the “Him” was talking about what interested him (cool stuff).

This divergence between content and form manifests itself more and more as the format crowds out content in media’s bid for our attention. Books are a salient example. As the publishing industry shifts from paper to screen, the qualities of the book itself just don’t seem as significant as the packaging and delivery technology. It’s begun to be reflected in editorial attitudes: ”Great concept, marvelous characters, super plot. But the author has no platform and a boring website. Sorry.”

Even reviewers have contracted the disease, especially those who cover the media online. Jason Kottke, posting a blog entitled The New Rules for Reviewing Media, observed “I’ve noticed an increasing tendency by reviewers on Amazon (and Apple’s iTunes and App Stores) to review things based on the packaging or format of the media with little regard shown to the actual content/plot.”

Unlike newspaper and magazine reviewers, says Kottke, their Internet cousins ask “whether a book would be good to read on a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle version or wait for the paperback. Or, as the above reviewers hammer home, if the book is available to read on the Kindle/iPad/Nook or if it’s better to wait until the director’s cut comes out.”

Kottke has put his finger on a significant trend, but although he neither condones or condemns it, we’ve expressed growing concern (see Watching Books) that literature will be judged on the most superficial grounds: not how artistic it is, but what’s the best gadget to read it on.

“In the end,” writes Kottke, “people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts.”

Troubling.

Richard Curtis

You call it multitasking. Christine Pearson calls it rude.  Pearson, a business professor who lectures on the subject of incivility, is talking about texting during meetings.

“I define incivility as behavior, seemingly inconsequential to the doer, that others perceive as inconsiderate,” writes Pearson, co-author of a book about it, in the New York Times. “Electronic devices lead to more incivility because of their powerful ability to claim our attention — no matter where we are or what we’re doing. No one likes to be snubbed, of course, but the offense can take on a new edge when the winner is a machine.”

Pearson’s book is called The Cost of Bad Behavior. And just what exactly is the cost of this egregious behavior? For one thing, says Pearson, you may suffer the resentment of your colleagues who have to “pick up the slack caused by the wandering attention and diluted energies of their e-cruising colleagues.” Also, it’s a kind of insult to your fellow workers, who may feel that the unspoken message you’re communicating to them is, “You are less important to me than my cellphone/P.D.A./laptop/latest gizmo.”

Incivility can  redound to your own detriment, too.  “In my research, I’ve learned that when employees behave in an uncivil way, their colleagues may take retribution. They might withhold information — for example, by ‘forgetting’ to include the offender’s name on a final product. Or they might see to it that he or she ends up with a less desirable task next time. Or they might even refuse to work with the person again.” In other words, the ultimate cost of abusing texting privileges could be not just ostracism, but your very job.

But perhaps the most insidious effect of inappropriate texting is the dangerous self-delusion that multitasking increases your efficiency.  Not true, says Pearson, citing sociological evidence. “Neuroscientists tell us that dividing our attention between competing stimuli instead of handling tasks one at a time actually makes us less efficient,” she says.

This reinforces something we’ve said again and again about e-books: any task performed on a screen – such as reading – can be distracting and possibly even detrimental. “My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information,” says Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction. “They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.”  (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction.)

The problem is particularly acute for young minds. Christine Pearson’s Sending a Message That You Don’t Care may be aimed at adults,  but it applies in spades to children. Another reason to curb your child’s texting habits -  as if you needed excuses.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Jonah Lehrer, a cognitive neuroscientist and contributing editor at Wired, is sympathetic to those who have recently expressed concern that the focused, immersive experience of reading paper books will be compromised by e-book reading. (See The Medium is the Screen, The Message is Distraction). In fact, he confesses he himself recently struggled with a Tolstoy epic in print format and even fell asleep a few times. “In a world oversaturated with information.” he says, “I wonder if it’s increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book.”

That said, he’s confident that “after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.”

“I don’t worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading “routinized, familiar passages” a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It’s the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.”

You can see how he reached his conclusion in Reading, E-Books and the Brain, posted on scienceblogs.com.

RC

In connection with our recent posting, The Medium Is Screens. The Message Is Distraction…

Anecdotal support for the concern expressed by child development authorities about reading on screen comes from Lily, a 15-year-0ld, who left this comment on the NYTimes “Room for Debate” blogpost:

“I am 15 years old, and an avid reader. I love a good hardcover or paperback, physical pages are easier on my eyes, and I understand completely what my parents are saying when they lament that print newspapers are going extinct. Don’t get me wrong; the digital age is great. I read the NY Times, the Washington Post, and lots of other blogs/sites online. When I come across a word I don’t know, I can look it up in 5 seconds. But I agree with several of the authors above that the sheer volume of information on the web is overwhelming, and is an incredible distraction. I’ll be reading poems on some literary archive site, click on an add that looks interesting, then remember that I wanted to post something on facebook, and completely forget about what I was doing originally. Sometimes I find myself switching activities even more frequently than every 3 minutes, and I don’t think young people are especially good at multi-tasking. I just think that multi-tasking has become unavoidable because of how driven to distraction we are by all the bombarding sidebars. I don’t spend enough time anymore reading “real” books, and so while e-books seem fine, I’d ideally like to maintain regular reading in both mediums.”