Annotation Directions: EMHS 9TH SUMMER READING 1. Make a point of underlining the two most
important ideas in each “column” of reading. Each year, students at EMHS do summer reading. You can underline a single phrase or a couple Reading over the summer keeps one’s mind “awake” of sentences, but please choose your selections and provides your class with an immediate platform carefully. to work on from the first day of school. The material for this packet was selected for its subject matter and 2. Of the two ideas you underline in each column, relevance to you. select the most important one and rephrase it at the bottom of the page in your own words.
Please make a point of reading all five of the articles 3. When you finish an article, review your contained in this packet. Since there are several annotations. On a separate sheet of paper, different pieces, you can break this reading up as write down the “takeaway points” for each your summer schedule allows. All articles should article—the most important ideas. be read and annotated by the first day of school. Please bring this packet with you on the first day of school. There are many online sources to further explain how to annotate a text. When you come to school on the first day, this packet should be completely read This packet should be printed out and read carefully. and annotated. In addition, you should have You should always read with a pen or pencil and use your takeaway points on a separate sheet of annotation strategies to help yourself make sense paper completed. These materials will be used for of the text. To annotate a reading means to mark it the first week or two of class to begin work. up as you go, making notes of important ideas. You will be graded on your annotations.
GROWING UP DIGITAL, WIRED FOR DISTRACTION “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for by Matt Richtel jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer? kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.” By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have But even as some parents and educators express unease about finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with months. students and give them essential skills. Across the country, He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow technological territory. he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside only summer homework. High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on gratification.” Facebook.
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has learning. asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center. they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because and less able to sustain attention. students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because
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they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital Vishal, like his mother, says he lacks the self-control to favor devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are schoolwork over the computer. She sat him down a few weeks addicted to the virtual world and lost in it. before school started and told him that, while she respected his passion for film and his technical skills, he had to use them “I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys productively. and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.” “This is the year,” she says she told him. “This is your senior year and you can’t afford not to focus.” The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him. passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with Growing Up With Gadgets digital cameras and editing software. When he was 3, Vishal moved with his parents and older He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, brother to their current home, a three-bedroom house in the Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the working-class section of Redwood City, a suburb in Silicon computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the Valley that is more diverse than some of its elite neighbors. San Francisco airport, build her own Web site. Thin and quiet with a shy smile, Vishal passed the admissions But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly test for a prestigious public elementary and middle school. sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school Until sixth grade, he focused on homework, regularly going to nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to the house of a good friend to study with him. videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.” But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the Several teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students, and seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a they wonder why things are not adding up. Last semester, his computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and grade point average was 2.3 after a D-plus in English and an F surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he in Algebra II. He got an A in film critique. describes as an inclination to procrastinate.
“He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one “I realized there were choices,” Vishal recalls. “Homework that is virtual and one with real-life demands. wasn’t the only option.”
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Several recent studies show that young people tend to use moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this school and, often, while studying. can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but University who led some of the research, said that when adults they can get more in-depth, like “if someone tells you about a were not supervising computer use, children “are left to their drama going on with someone,” Allison said. “I can text one own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play person while talking on the phone to someone else.” around.” But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking Research also shows that students often juggle homework and for the three B’s on her recent progress report. entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the “I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message Internet, watching TV or using some other form of media and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later that they are doing homework. realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”
At Woodside, as elsewhere, students’ use of technology is not Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — uniform. Mr. Reilly, the principal, says their choices tend to they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays reflect their personalities. Social butterflies tend to be heavy six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, texters and Facebook users. Students who are less social might leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school. escape into games, while drifters or those prone to Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire procrastination, like Vishal, might surf the Web or watch for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me to videos. separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between The technology has created on campuses a new set of social my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and start playing video games and escape.” gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato. With powerful new cellphones, the interactive experience can “The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says. go everywhere. Between classes at Woodside or at lunch, when use of personal devices is permitted, students gather in For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends clusters, sometimes chatting face to face, sometimes half- and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a involved in a conversation while texting someone across the blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text teeming quad. Others sit alone, watching a video, listening to conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the music or updating Facebook. -4-
Students say that their parents, worried about the distractions, Sam Crocker, Vishal’s closest friend, who has straight A’s but try to police computer time, but that monitoring the use of lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the Internet’s cellphones is difficult. Parents may also want to be able to call distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer their children at any time, so taking the phone away is not reading books. always an option. “I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Other parents wholly embrace computer use, even when it has Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it no obvious educational benefit. feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel “If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on gratified anyway.” top of the world,” said John McMullen, 56, a retired criminal investigator whose son, Sean, is one of five friends in the group He concludes: “My attention span is getting worse.” Vishal joins for lunch each day. The Lure of Distraction Sean’s favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was playing more Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, Vishal. They have begun to understand what happens to the the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch. wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing focus, asserting that in another era he would have been video games after they finished homework. distracted by TV or something else. On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an “Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the the effect of video games and TV. evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise since remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality still look the same.” than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the
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boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. published in the journal Pediatrics. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.” Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the “The headline is: bring back boredom,” added Dr. Rich, who boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he last month gave a speech to the American Academy of speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary. from the River of Electronic Screens.”
“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after Dr. Rich said in an interview that he was not suggesting young that, your brain has to decide which information to store,” he people should toss out their devices, but rather that they said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating embrace a more balanced approach to what he said were information over the vocabulary.” powerful tools necessary to compete and succeed in modern life. At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an The heavy use of devices also worries Daniel Anderson, a unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they Amherst, who is known for research showing that children are process those patterns in a way that seems to create a not as harmed by TV viewing as some researchers have persistent memory. suggested.
In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active stimulating computers and phones, Professor Anderson says, during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers appears to have a more powerful effect than TV. that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and Like Dr. Rich, he says he believes that young, developing even develop the sense of self. brains are becoming habituated to distraction and to switching tasks, not to focus. Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and “If you’ve grown up processing multiple media, that’s exactly setting priorities. the mode you’re going to fall into when put in that environment — you develop a need for that stimulation,” he said.
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Vishal can attest to that. sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying “I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two woman was shot separately from the image of the kneeling with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a man, and he is trying to fuse them. million things at once, like a lot of people my age,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, “I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he but I can’t.” says.
“If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d focus more on school and be He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but doing better academically,” he says. But thanks to the Internet, he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing homework. He he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know what his chosen future, and he hopes colleges, like the University of I want to do with my life.” Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by his portfolio that they will Clicking Toward a Future overlook his school performance.
The woman sits in a cemetery at dusk, sobbing. Behind her, “This is going to compensate for the grades,” he says. On this silhouetted and translucent, a man kneels, then fades away, a day, his homework includes a worksheet for Latin, some ghost. reading for English class and an economics essay, but they can wait. This captivating image appears on Vishal’s computer screen. On this Thursday afternoon in late September, he is engrossed For Vishal, there’s another clear difference between in scenes he shot the previous weekend for a music video he is filmmaking and homework: interactivity. As he edits, the making with his cousin. windows on the screen come alive; every few seconds, he clicks the mouse to make tiny changes to the lighting and flow of the The video is based on a song performed by the band Guns N’ images, and the software gives him constant feedback. Roses about a woman whose boyfriend dies. He wants it to be part of the package of work he submits to colleges that “I click and something happens,” he says, explaining that, by emphasize film study, along with a documentary he is making comparison, reading a book or doing homework is less about home-schooled students. exciting. “I guess it goes back to the immediate gratification thing.” Now comes the editing. Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on The $2,000 computer Vishal is using is state of the art and YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, only a week old. It represents a concession by his parents. They -7-
allowed him to buy it, despite their continuing concerns about than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana his technology habits, because they wanted to support his mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard. filmmaking dream. “If we put roadblocks in his way, he’s just going to get depressed,” his mother says. Besides, she adds, “Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the “he’s been making an effort to do his homework.” program used by the best music studios in the world,” he says.
At this point in the semester, it seems she is right. The first In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He schoolwide progress reports come out in late September, and introduced the audio course last year and enough students Vishal has mostly A’s and B’s. He says he has been able to signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one make headway by applying himself, but also by cutting back class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had his workload. Unlike last year, he is not taking advanced secured iPads to help teach the language.) placement classes, and he has chosen to retake Algebra II not in the classroom but in an online class that lets him work at his “Some of these students are our most at-risk kids,” he says. He own pace. means that they are more likely to tune out school, skip class or not do their homework, and that they may not get healthful His shift to easier classes might not please college admissions meals at home. They may also do their most enthusiastic officers, according to Woodside’s college adviser, Zorina writing not for class but in text messages and on Facebook. Matavulj. She says they want seniors to intensify their efforts. “They’re here, they’re in class, they’re listening.” As it is, she says, even if Vishal improves his performance significantly, someone with his grades faces long odds in Despite Woodside High’s affluent setting, about 40 percent of applying to the kinds of colleges he aspires to. its 1,800 students come from low-income families and receive a reduced-cost or free lunch. The school is 56 percent Latino, Still, Vishal’s passion for film reinforces for Mr. Reilly, the 38 percent white and 5 percent African-American, and it sends principal, that the way to reach these students is on their own 93 percent of its students to four-year or community colleges. terms. Mr. Reilly says that the audio class provides solid vocational Hands-On Technology training and can get students interested in other subjects.
Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip “Today mixing music, tomorrow sound waves and physics,” he glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. says. And he thinks the key is that they love not just the music He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who but getting their hands on the technology. “We’re meeting has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly’s them on their turf.” new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more
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It does not mean he sees technology as a panacea. “I’ll always filmmaking. Mr. Diesel says he wonders if Vishal is a bit take one great teacher in a cave over a dozen Smart Boards,” like Woody Allen, talented but not interested in being part of he says, referring to the high-tech teaching displays used in the system. many schools. But Mr. Diesel adds: “If Vishal’s going to be an independent Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for filmmaker, he’s got to read Vonnegut. If you’re going to write students’ struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over scripts, you’ve got to read.” whether embracing computers is the right solution. Back to Reading Aloud “It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization of Vishal sits near the back of English IV. Marcia Blondel, a their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make veteran teacher, asks the students to open the book they are the problem worse when they adopt the technology. studying, “The Things They Carried,” which is about the Vietnam War. “When rock ’n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology,” he says. He “Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she personally feels the sting, since his advanced classes have one- asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow third as many students as they had a decade ago. along.
Vishal remains a Latin student, one whom Mr. Eaton describes To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a as particularly bright. But the teacher wonders if technology regression in American education and an indictment of might be the reason Vishal seems to lose interest in academics technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that the minute he leaves class. students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own. Mr. Diesel, by contrast, does not think technology is behind the problems of Vishal and his schoolmates — in fact, he thinks “How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, it is the key to connecting with them, and an essential tool. arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent “It’s in their DNA to look at screens,” he asserts. And he offers years. In some classes she can count on little more than one- another analogy to explain his approach: “Frankenstein is in third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment. the room and I don’t want him to tear me apart. If I’m not using technology, I lose them completely.” She adds: “You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations.” Mr. Diesel had Vishal as a student in cinema class and describes him as a “breath of fresh air” with a gift for -9-
As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: “I Richtel, Matt. "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction." hope this will motivate you to read on your own.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 Nov. 2010. Web. 12 May 2015. It is a reminder of the choices that have followed the students through the semester: computer or homework? Immediate gratification or investing in the future?
Mr. Reilly hopes that the two can meet — that computers can be combined with education to better engage students and can give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought. But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of “The Things They Carried.” His grade at that point, she says, tracks around a D.
For his part, Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking, accelerating work with his cousin on their music video project. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos on YouTube. The evidence of the shift comes in a string of Facebook updates.
Saturday, 11:55 p.m.: “Editing, editing, editing”
Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours of shooting, 8+ hours of editing. All for just a three-minute scene. Mind = Dead.” Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, finally got to spend a day relaxing... now about that homework...”
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IN DEFENSE OF TECHNOLOGY less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is by Andrew O’Hagan that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker. The children don’t believe me when I tell them life used to be hard. They think it’s a routine out of Charles Dickens, a tale of To believe in progress is not only to believe in the future: It is filthy lodgings, stale bread and no Internet, where even the also to usher in the possibility that the past wasn’t all that. I most resourceful among us struggled to survive in a world now feel — and this is a revelation — that my past was an without teeth-bleaching or Kindle. My daughter rolls her eyes interesting and quite fallow period spent waiting for the whenever I begin my stories of woe. “Here he goes,” she says. Internet. At home, I’ll continue to cause a festival of eye-rolling “Tell the one about how you used to walk to school alone. And with my notion that some values were preserved by the low- the other one, about how you had to remember people’s phone tech environment, but, more generally speaking, life has just numbers! And: Watch this. Dad, tell the one about how you gotten better and better. The question is: How far would you used to swim outside, like in a pond or something. With frogs go with that? My daughter’s mother goes all the way. “I can sit in it!” in my holiday house in the country,” she says, “and order furniture, clothes, anything really, to come from London and “You know, darling. It wasn’t so long ago. And it wasn’t such a Paris. It’s killed provincialism. It’s also killed human hardship either. There was actually something quite pleasant loneliness.” about, say, getting lost as you walked in a city, without immediately resorting to Google Maps.” “That’s shocking,” I say. “Luxury can’t kill loneliness.”
“As if!” “You want to bet?”
And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy So, I’ve been on the back foot. I didn’t know it when I was life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to young, but maybe we were just waiting for more stuff and ways be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a to save time. Is that right? Were we just waiting for Twitter to new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is come along and show us there were sexy and clever people out better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi there and funny stuff happening all the time in places we’d River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a barely even heard of? I mean, how could I ever pretend life was vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living even half tolerable in the 1970s, when a slow game of Pong or a high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was fast episode of “Mork & Mindy” felt like a glittering revelation life as good as it is now? One is almost programmed, if over the of things to come? My God: It took punk, which was basically age of 35, to say no to this question. One is supposed to stare just a bunch of art students jumping around wearing safety into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life -11-
pins, to wake us out of the doldrums. I grew up in a world particular recording there when you want to hear it, but where people did mental arithmetic just to fill the time. nothing in my long years of hunting for and buying records can beat Spotify. I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was Then I got over it — and some. I’ve come fully round to time- something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old saving apps. I’ve become addicted to the luxury of clicking system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover through for just about everything I need. Yesterday morning, they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights for example, I realized I needed to know something about a and measures of their own experience: We value our own story distant relative for a book I’m writing. I’m old enough to and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the remember when one had to pack a bag and take a train; when romantic notion that the past is always a better country. one had to stand in queues at libraries, complete an There’s a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell application form, then scroll for hours through hard-to-read you the opposite. microfiche and take notes and repeat. I’m not 104, but I wrote a whole book that way, my first, and it took forever and it Getting better is getting better. Improvement is improving. didn’t add much to most of the paragraphs. Yesterday, I had There will, of course, always be people who feel alienated by a the information from an archive website in about 20 minutes. new thing and there might be a compelling argument to Then I made a list of winter clothes to purchase from Mr. suggest all this availability is merely a high-speed way of filling Porter. Then I ordered a car from Uber to take me to King’s a spiritual gap in our lives. Yet I can assure you there was no College London to teach a class, and I emailed my notes to my lack of spiritual gap in the lives of people living in small towns office computer from the car and I dealt with a dozen emails in 1982. It was just a lot harder to bridge that gap. We used to and I read a review of a restaurant I was going to that evening wait for years for a particular film to come on television, and watched part of a video of a ballet I was due to see before thinking we might never see it. One had practically to join a dinner. cult in order to share a passionate interest. I can still remember Tupperware parties, when — Oh, the good old days! What has been lost? Nothing. Has something gone out of my — women would meet at each other’s houses on rain-soaked experience of life by ordering all the shopping on Ocado rather evenings to try out and buy pastel-colored breakfast bowls. than by pushing a cart around the aisles of a supermarket for And that was a good night! Communication was usually a stab an hour and a half? Yes: A pain in my backside has been in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your relieved. It is all now done by a series of small, familiar favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved flutterings over the keyboard, which I can do at my leisure, any to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board. And now time of day or night, without looking for the car keys or you can find the love of your life by posting a picture and straining my sense of sociability by running into hundreds of proving you’ve got a GSOH (great sense of humor). Every day people who are being similarly tortured by their own basic now there’s something new to replace the old way of doing a needs. I’ve always liked music, the sheer luxury of having a crucial thing that was hard to do. Is it the middle of the night -12-
and you live in Idaho and you want to talk to someone about knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you your roses? Is it Christmas Eve in Rome and you want to know happily remember from the simple life of yore. where to hear some music and light a candle? My daughter was right to laugh. Because what she was hearing Physical loneliness can still exist, of course, but you’re never was a hint of vanity and a note of pride in my stories of the friendless online. Don’t tell me the spiritual life is over. In unimproved life. In point of fact, we sat in the past and burned many ways it’s only just begun. Technology is not doing what with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to the sci-fi writers warned it might — it is not turning us into discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a digits or blank consumers, into people who hate community. panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn’t to plant a flag on Instead, there is evidence that the improvements are making the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to us more democratic, more aware of the planet, more interested sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but in the experience of people who aren’t us, more connected to hoping we might like it when we got there. My favorite record the mysteries of privacy and surveillance. It’s also pressing us when I was a teenager, trapped in a box bedroom in a to question what it means to have life so easy, when billions do suburban corner of old Europe, was “How Soon Is Now?” by not. I lived through the age of complacency, before the Smiths. I had taken a bus and a train and walked for miles information arrived and the outside world liquified its borders. to buy the record, and it told a story about giving yourself up to And now it seems as if the real split in the world will not only experience. I don’t know where the physical record has gone. be between the fed and the unfed, the healthy and the It’s probably still in my mother’s attic. But the song is right unhealthy, but between those with smartphones and those here at the end of my fingertips as I’m typing, and in the new, without. constantly improving world around us, it took me just under 15 seconds to locate it. Would anyone care to dance? Technology changed my character. It didn’t change my parents’. My mother says she wasn’t touched by the moon O'Hagan, Andrew. "In Defense of Technology." T Magazine. landing or the Internet, though she admits that having a fridge The New York Times Company, 05 Nov. 2014. Web. 12 has made a wonderful difference. She’s not nostalgic for the May 2015. days when they would place the milk bottles out on the window ledge overnight — that does the trick, in Scotland — though she has a general feeling that life was cozier and friendlier years ago. I must have taken some of that from her, but the more I think of it the more I see it as an affectation. For me, life did not become more complex with technology, it’s became more amenable, and what a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, -13-
Social Media Effects on Teens | kept themselves busy, too, but they were more likely to do their chatting on the phone, or in person when hanging out at the Impact of Social Media on Self- mall. It may have looked like a lot of aimless hanging around, Esteem but what they were doing was experimenting, trying out skills, Rachel Ehmke is managing editor at the Child Mind Institute. and succeeding and failing in tons of tiny real-time interactions that kids today are missing out on.
Many parents worry about how exposure to technology might For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their affect toddlers developmentally. We know our preschoolers are communication while looking at a screen, not another person. picking up new social and cognitive skills at a stunning pace, and we don’t want hours spent glued to an iPad to impede that. “As a species we are very highly attuned to reading social But adolescence is an equally important period of rapid cues,” says Dr. Catherine Steiner- Adair, a clinical psychologist development, and too few of us are paying attention to how and author of The Big Disconnect. “There’s no question kids our teenagers’ use of technology—much more intense and are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting intimate than a 3-year-old playing with dad’s iPhone—is and online communicating—it’s not like it creates a nonverbal affecting them. In fact, experts worry that the social media and learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem. even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible.” Young people report that there might be good reason to worry. A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health Lowering the risks asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found Certainly speaking indirectly creates a barrier to clear that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to communication, but that’s not all. Learning how to make increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a loneliness. certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it’s also true for maintaining friendships. When Indirect communication there are problems that need to be faced—big ones or small ones—it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and Teens are masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours then hear what the other person has to say. after school until way past bedtime. When they’re not doing their homework (and when they are) they’re online and on Learning to effectively cross these bridges is part of what their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it. makes friendship fun and exciting, and also scary. “Part of Of course before everyone had an Instagram account teens healthy self-esteem is knowing how to say what you think and
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feel even when you’re in disagreement with other people or it teaching them to do is disagree in ways that are more extreme feels emotionally risky,” notes Dr. Steiner-Adair. and do jeopardize the relationship. It’s exactly what you don’t want to have happen,” she says. But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most Dr. Steiner-Adair agrees that girls are particularly at risk. personal—and sometimes intimidating—aspects of “Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other communication. It’s easier to keep your guard up when you’re people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it texting, so less is at stake. You aren’t hearing or seeing the makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this.” She effect that your words are having on the other person. Because warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. “We the conversation isn’t happening in real time, each party can forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and take more time to consider a response. No wonder kids say feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people calling someone on the phone is “too intense”—it requires down so you feel better.” more direct communication, and if you aren’t used to that it may well feel scary. Peer acceptance is a big thing for adolescents, and many of them care about their image as much as a politician running If kids aren’t getting enough practice relating to people and for office, and to them it can feel as serious. Add to that the getting their needs met in person and in real time, many of fact that kids today are getting actual polling data on how them will grow up to be adults who are anxious about our much people like them or their appearance via things like species’ primary means of communication—talking. And of “likes.” It’s enough to turn anyone’s head. Who wouldn’t want course social negotiations only get riskier as people get older to make herself look cooler if she can? So kids can spend hours and begin navigating romantic relationships and employment. pruning their online identities, trying to project an idealized image. Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, Cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the The other big danger that comes from kids communicating envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years atmosphere online. Kids gang up on each other. contemplate saying to anyone’s face,” says Dr. Donna Wick, a Adolescents have always been doing this, but with the advent clinical and developmental psychologist. She notes that this of social media they are faced with more opportunities—and seems to be especially true of girls, who typically don’t like to more traps—than ever before. When kids scroll through their disagree with each other in “real life.” feeds and see how great everyone seems, it only adds to the pressure. We’re used to worrying about the impractical ideals “You hope to teach them that they can disagree without jeopardizing the relationship, but what social media is that photoshopped magazine models give to our kids, but what happens with the kid next door is photoshopped, too? Even -15-
more confusing, what about when your own profile doesn’t “Whatever we think of the ‘relationships’ maintained and in really represent the person that you feel like you are on the some cases initiated on social media, kids never get a break inside? from them,” notes Dr. Wick. “And that, in and of itself, can produce anxiety. Everyone needs a respite from the demands “Adolescence and the early twenties in particular are the years of intimacy and connection; time alone to regroup, replenish in which you are acutely aware of the contrasts between who and just chill out. When you don’t have that, it’s easy to you appear to be and who you think you are,” says Dr. Wick. become emotionally depleted, fertile ground for anxiety to “It’s similar to the ‘imposter syndrome’ in psychology. As you breed.” get older and acquire more mastery, you begin to realize that you actually are good at some things, and then you feel that It’s also surprisingly easy to feel lonely in the middle of all that gap hopefully narrow. But imagine having your deepest hyperconnection. For one thing, kids now know with darkest fear be that you aren’t as good as you look, and then depressing certainty when they’re being ignored. We all have imagine needing to look that good all the time! It’s phones and we all respond to things pretty quickly, so when exhausting.” you’re waiting for a response that doesn’t come, the silence can be deafening. The silent treatment might be a strategic insult As Dr. Steiner-Adair explains, “Self-esteem comes from or just the unfortunate side effect of an online adolescent consolidating who you are.” The more identities you have, and relationship that starts out intensely but then fades away. the more time you spend pretending to be someone you aren’t, the harder it’s going to be to feel good about yourself. “In the old days when a boy was going to break up with you, he had to have a conversation with you. Or at least he had to call,” Stalking (and being ignored) says Dr. Wick. “These days he might just disappear from your screen, and you never get to have the ‘What did I do?’ Another big change that has come with new technology and conversation.” Kids are often left imagining the worst about especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids themselves. update their status, share what they’re watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their But even when the conversation doesn’t end, being in a specific location on a map at all times. Even if a person isn’t constant state of waiting can still provoke anxiety. We can feel trying to keep his friends updated, he’s still never out of reach ourselves being put on the back burner, we put others back of a text message. The result is that kids feel hyperconnected there, and our very human need to communicate is effectively with each other. The conversation never needs to stop, and it delegated there, too. feels like there’s always something new happening.
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What should parents do? won’t answer his question in a developmentally appropriate way.” Both experts interviewed for this article agreed that the best thing parents can do to minimize the risks associated with In addition Dr. Wick advises delaying the age of first use as technology is to curtail their own consumption first. It’s up to much as possible. “I use the same advice here that I use when parents to set a good example of what healthy computer usage talking about kids and alcohol—try to get as far as you can looks like. Most of us check our phones or our email too much, without anything at all.” If your child is on Facebook, Dr. Wick out of either real interest or nervous habit. Kids should be used says that you should be your child’s friend and monitor her to seeing our faces, not our heads bent over a screen. Establish page. But she advises against going through text messages technology-free zones in the house and technology-free hours unless there is cause for concern. “If you have a reason to be when no one uses the phone, including mom and dad. “Don’t worried then okay, but it better be a good reason. I see parents walk in the door after work in the middle of a conversation,” who are just plain old spying on their kids. Parents should Dr. Steiner-Adair advises. “Don’t walk in the door after work, begin by trusting their children. To not even give your kid the say ‘hi’ quickly, and then ‘just check your email.’ In the benefit of the doubt is incredibly damaging to the relationship. morning, get up a half hour earlier than your kids and check You have to feel like your parents think you’re a good kid.” your email then. Give them your full attention until they’re out the door. And neither of you should be using phones in the car Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy to or from school because that’s an important time to talk.” self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they’re interested in. It could be sports or music or taking apart Not only does limiting the amount of time you spend plugged computers or volunteering—anything that sparks an interest in to computers provide a healthy counterpoint to the tech- and gives them confidence. When kids learn to feel good about obsessed world, it also strengthens the parent-child bond and what they can do instead of how they look and what they own, makes kids feel more secure. Kids need to know that you are they’re happier and better prepared for success in real life. available to help them with their problems, talk about their That most of these activities also involve spending time day, or give them a reality check. interacting with peers face-to-face is just the icing on the cake.
“It is the mini-moments of disconnection, when parents are ______too focused on their own devices and screens, that dilute the parent-child relationship,” Dr. Steiner-Adair warns. And when Ehmke, Rachel. “ Social Media Effects on Teens: Impact of kids start turning to the Internet for help or to process Social Media on Self-Esteem.” The Child Mind Institute, 03 Aug. 2017. Web, 2 May 2018. whatever happened during the day, you might not like what happens. “Tech can give your children more information that you can, and it doesn’t have your values,” notes Dr. Steiner- Adair. “It won’t be sensitive to your child’s personality, and it -17-
WHY CAN’T WE READ ANYMORE? I’d read another sentence. That’s four sentences.
by Hugh McGuire Smokers who are the most optimistic about their ability to resist temptation are the most likely to relapse four months Last year, I read four books. later, and overoptimistic dieters are the least likely to lose weight. The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should It takes a long time to read a book at four sentences per day. have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It sentence number five. just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve I’ve noticed this pattern of behaviour for a while now, but I finished one chapter, you have to get through the another one. think last year’s completed book tally was as low as it has ever And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, been. It was dispiriting, most deeply so because my and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next professional life revolves around books: I started possibility. Next next next. LibriVox (free public domain audiobooks), and Pressbooks (an online platform for making print and ebooks), and I co-edited I am an optimist a book about the future of books.
Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed I’ve dedicated my life one way or another to books, I believe in with a book — paper or e — and started. Reading. Read. Ing. them, yet, I wasn’t able to read them. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences. I’m not alone. Maybe three. When the people at the New Yorker can’t concentrate And then … I needed just a little something else. Something to long enough to listen to a song all the way through, tide me over. Something to scratch that little itch at the back of how are books to survive? my mind— just a quick look at email on my iPhone; to write, and erase, a response to a funny Tweet from William Gibson; I heard an interview on the New Yorker podcast recently, the to find, and follow, a link to a good, really good, article in host was interviewing writer and photographer, Teju Cole. the New Yorker, or, better, the New York Review of Books (which I might even read most of, if it is that good). Email again, just to be sure.
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Host: strangers. It didn’t matter that she didn’t dance, I was so proud. I took photos, and video, with my phone. One of the challenges in culture now is to, say, listen to a song all the way through, we’re all so distracted, are you still able And, just in case, I checked my email. Twitter. You never to kind of give deep attention to things, are you able to sort of know. engage in culture that way?” I find myself in these kinds of situations often, checking email Teju Cole: or Twitter, or Facebook, with nothing to gain except the stress of a work-related message that I can’t answer right now in any “Yes, very much so.” case.
When I heard this, I felt like hugging the host. He couldn’t It makes me feel vaguely dirty, reading my phone with my even listen to a song all the way through, before getting daughter doing something wonderful right next to me, like I’m distracted. Imagine what his bedside pile of books does to him. sneaking a cigarette.
I also felt like hugging Teju Cole. It’s people like Mr. Cole who Or a crack pipe. give us hope that someone will be left to teach our children how to read books. One time I was reading on my phone while my older daughter, the four-year-old, was trying to talk to me. I didn’t quite hear Dancing to distraction what she had said, and in any case, I was reading an article about North Korea. She grabbed my face in her two hands, What was true of my problems reading books — the pulled me towards her. “Look at me,” she said, “when I’m unavoidable siren call of the digital hit of new information — talking to you.” was true in the rest of my life as well. She is right. I should. My two-year old daughter, dance recital. Pink tutu. Cat ears on her head. Along with five other two-year-olds, in front of a crowd of 75 parents and grandparents, these little toddlers put on a show. You can imagine the rest. You’ve seen these videos Spending time with friends, or family, I often feel a soul-deep on Youtube, maybe I have shown you my videos. The cuteness throb coming from that perfectly engineered wafer of stainless level was extreme, a moment that defines a certain kind of steel and glass and rare earth metals in my pocket. Touch me. parental pride. My daughter didn’t even dance, she just Look at me. You might find something marvellous. wandered around the stage, looking at the audience with eyes as wide as a two-year old’s eyes starting at a bunch of -19-
This sickness is not limited to when I am trying to read, or With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up once-in-a-lifetime events with my daughter. with activity when new emails arrive.
At work, my concentration is constantly broken: finishing So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of writing an article (this one, actually), answering that client’s dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your request, reviewing and commenting on the new designs, brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. cleaning up the copy on the About page. Contacting so and so. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will Taxes. give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become All these tasks critical to my livelihood, get bumped more often unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, than I should admit by a quick look at Twitter (for work), or check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Facebook (also for work), or an article about Mandelbrot Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time sets (which, just this minute, I read). the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains. Email, of course, is the worst, because email is where work happens, and even if it’s not the work you should be doing How can books compete? right now it may well be work that’s easier to do than what you are doing now, and that means somehow you end up doing Pleasing ourselves to death that work instead of whatever you are supposed to be working on now. And only then do you get back to what you should There is a famous study of rats, wired up with electrodes on have been focusing on all along. their brains. When the rats press a lever, a little charge gets released in part of their brain that stimulates dopamine Dopamine and digital release. A pleasure lever.
It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to Given a choice between food and dopamine, they’ll take the train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we dopamine, often up to the point of exhaustion and starvation. should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent They’ll take the dopamine over sex. Some studies see the rats neuroscience studies, is something like this: pressing the dopamine lever 700 times in an hour.
New information creates a rush of dopamine to the We do the same things with our email. Refresh. Refresh. brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good. There is no beautiful universe on the other side of the email The promise of new information compels your brain refresh button, and yet it’s the call of that button that keeps to seek out that dopamine rush. -20-
pulling me out of the work I am doing, out of reading books I meaningless wash of digital information, which would have a want to read. double benefit: I would be reading books again, and I would get my mind back. Why are books important? And, there are, often, beautiful universes to be found on the When I think back on my life, I can define a set of books that other side of the cover of a book. shaped me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Books have always been an escape, a learning experience, a saviour, but The problems with digital stuff beyond this, greater than this, certain books became, over time, a kind of glue that holds together my understanding of Recent neuroscience confirms many of the things we sufferers the world. I think of them as nodes of knowledge and emotion, of digital overload know innately. That successful multi- nodes that knot together the fabric my self. Books, for me tasking is a myth. Multi-tasking makes us stupider. According anyway, hold together who I am. to psychologist Glenn Wilson, the cognitive losses from multitasking are equivalent to smoking pot. Books, in ways that are different to visual art, to music, to radio, to love even, force us to walk through another’s This is bad for so many reasons: it makes us less effective at thoughts, one word at a time, over hours and days. We share work, which means either we get less done, or have less time to our minds for that time with the writer’s. There is a slowness, a spend doing other things, or both. forced reflection required by the medium that is unique. Books recreate someone else’s thoughts inside our own minds, and Being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a maybe it is this one-to-one mapping of someone else’s words, task, and an e-mail is sitting unread in your inbox, can on their own, without external stimuli, that give books their reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. power. Books force us to let someone else’s thoughts inhabit It’s worse than that though, because this constant hopping our minds completely. from one thing to another is also exhausting. Books are not just transferrers of knowledge and emotion, but My least productive days, the days when I have spent the most a special kind of tool that flattens one self into another, that time jumping between projects and emails and Twitter and enable the trying-on of foreign ideas and emotions. whatever else, are also my most exhausting days. I used to This suppressing of the self is a kind of meditation too — and think that my exhaustion was the cause of this lack of focus, while books have always been important to me on their own but it turns out the opposite might be true. (pre-digital) merits, it started to occur to me that “learning It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. how to read books again,” might also be a way to start weaning It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who my mind away from this dopamine-soaked digital detritus, this -21-
organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not Those who read own the world, and those who watch only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less television lose it. (Werner Herzog) neurochemically depleted after doing it. I don’t know if Werner Herzog is right, but I do know that I The problem defined would never say about television — even the great stuff, of which there is plenty — what I say about books. There are no And so, the problem, more or less, is identified: television shows that exist as nodes holding together my understanding of the world. My relationship to television is 1. I cannot read books because my brain has been trained just not the same as it is to books. to want a constant hit of dopamine, which a digital interruption will provide And, so, a change
2. This digital dopamine addiction means I have trouble And so, starting in January, I started making some changes. focusing: on books, work, family and friends The key ones are:
Problem identified, or most of it. There is more. 1. No more Twitter, Facebook, or article reading during the work day (hard) Oh, and don’t forget about television 2. No reading of random news articles (hard) We live in a golden age of television, there is no doubt. The stuff being produced these days is very good. And there is a lot 3. No smartphones or computers in the bedroom (easy) of it. 4. No TV after dinner (it turns out, easy) For the past couple of years, my evening routine has been a variation on: get home from work, exhausted. Make sure the 5. Instead, go straight to bed and start reading a book — girls have eaten. Make sure I eat. Get the girls to bed. Feel usually on an eink ereader (it turns out, easy) exhausted. Turn on the computer to watch some (neo-golden- age-era) television. Fiddle with work emails, and generally The shocking thing was how quickly my mind adapted to piddle around while that golden-age-era TV consumes 57% of accommodate reading books again. I had expected to fight for my attention. Be bad at watching TV and bad at getting emails that concentration — but I didn’t have to fight. With less digital done. Go to bed. Try to read. Check email. Try to read again. input (no pre-bed TV, especially), extra time (no TV, again), Fall asleep. and without a tempting digital device near at hand … there was time and space for my mind to settle into a book.
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What a wonderful feeling it was.
I am reading books now more than I have in years. I have more energy, and more focus than I’ve had for ages. I have not fully conquered my digital dopamine addiction, though, but it’s getting there. I think reading books is helping me retrain my mind for focus.
And books, it turns out, are still the same wonderful things they used to be. I can read them again.
McGuire, Hugh. "Why Can't We Read Anymore?" Medium. Medium, 22 Apr. 2015. Web. 12 May 2015.
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THE DEFENSE OF COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, AND press, newspapers, paperbacks and television. Now, the fear stems from PowerPoint, search engines and Twitter. OUR BRAINS by Nick Bilton Professor Pinker points out that our brains are intended to be rewired and learn new things. It’s the way we are built: If you’re reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you’re doing immediately. You Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their could be making yourself stupid. And whatever you do, don’t case, citing research that shows how “experience can change click on the links in this post. They could distract you from the the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such flow of my beautiful prose and narrative. talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the This is the alarm currently being rung by some in the bell pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean towers of technology. the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
There is a lively discussion and some concern that computers, Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide,” also argues that the Internet and multitasking are extracting a mental price. our brains are likely just fine on the Internet. Mr. Lehrer, a former neuroscientist, writes on his blog, The Frontal Cortex, Nicholas Carr argues in his book “The Shallows,” that the that “given this paucity of evidence, I think it’s far too soon to Internet, computers, Google, Twitter and the like, are making be drawing firm conclusions about the negative effects of the us into shallow thinkers and the neurocircuitry of our brain Web.” that long form reading creates is critical for society to function. Mr. Carr thinks that the Web, with its colored hypertext and In a recent blog post Mr. Lehrer notes that the evidence critics endless abyss of bite-sized morsels of information, is making use to attack the Web could be used to argue that we shouldn’t us stupid. even walk down a city street as the cognitive load is far too great for our brains to handle. He notes that a in 2008, a group And although there are plenty of others in this camp, there are of scientists from the University of Michigan engaged in a some who argue that not only are our brains just fine on the study that showed walking led the brain to see a “dramatic Internet, but they are indeed better off for it. decreases in working memory, self-control, visual attention and positive affect.” Mr Lehrer writes: Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Harvard, argues on the Op-Ed page in Friday’s When people walk down the street, they are forced to exert New York Times that the current outcry is nothing new. The cognitive control and top-down attention, and all that mental same was heard, he writes, after the invention of the printing effort takes a temporary toll on their brain.
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Based on this data, it would be easy to conclude that we should Research shows that each medium offers its own positive avoid the metropolis, that the city street is a hazardous place. attributes: Neuroscience has shown that playing video games stimulates areas of our brains that control working memory, Then there is the reality that our brains, the tool that you, the hand and eye coordination and attention and can stimulate reader, are currently using to decode these symbols and and vastly improve our cognitive skills. Reading on the other understand what they mean, has still not evolved to naturally hand promotes deep thought and exercises areas of the brain learn to read: reading is an unnatural task that we still need to responsible for reflection, reasoning and critical analysis. And train our brains to learn. auditory storytelling stimulates areas of the brain involved with creativity, contextual thinking and executive function. Maryanne Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts, and author of “Proust and the It could be argued that the Web, which is the ultimate library Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” notes that of words, video, images, interactivity, sharing and our brains were never actually designed to read. In a blog post conversation, is the quintessential place to learn. last year on The Times blog, Room for Debate, Ms. Wolf wrote: Bilton, Nick. "The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our After many years of research on how the human brain learns to Brains." Bits: The New York Times. The New York read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans Times Company, 11 June 2010. Web. 12 May 2015. were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that.
Ms. Wolf, who is concerned about the effects of the Web on children, recently explained in a phone interview that although our brains are not designed to read, the act and process children go through when decoding letters and narrative is an imperative part of a child’s development and thinking.
Ms. Wolf points out different media have value. “I’m not saying other mediums and technologies are not good for the brain, research shows that they are,” she said, “but we must understand the use of visual auditory narratives so we don’t neglect the role of the reading circuit.” -25-