In a recent post I summarized the debate over using digital devices in the classroom. But the onslaught on digital devices is ubiquitous*: take, for example, a NYT article from last spring titled “Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?)“—which also includes the featured image above by Andy Rash. The article follows the typical narrative style of these arguments, starting with seemingly indisputable scientific facts:
A 2014 study…found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task.
or
Research shows that just having a phone on the table is sufficiently distracting to reduce empathy and rapport between two people who are in conversation.
And then come the testimonials on the downfalls of distraction and the upside of monotasking, e.g.,
I had to write my business school application essays, and I was having no luck spending an hour here and there after work and on the weekends….I just wasn’t inspired. After spending a few days hiking in the Arctic by myself, I was able to get all of them done in just a few days.
or
If I keep looking at my phone or my inbox or various websites, working feels a lot more tortuous. When I’m focused and making progress, work is actually pleasurable.
Can we just agree, for the record, that there is indeed such a thing as distraction, and that it’s not always helpful? But can we also agree that distraction predates digital devices, as wisdom traditions of the world have told us for millennia? I’ve practiced martial arts for years; there it’s called monkey mind. So, what we are up against is the human condition—not simply those new-fangled things the older generation worries about the younger generation using to excess.
And maybe distraction is not always a bad thing. There is another side to this story, told perhaps most notably by Cathy Davidson in posts such as “The Myth of Monotasking” and her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Davidson has a quite different take on things:
Bottom line: the mind wanders a lot because the mind’s task is to wander.
and
Multitasking is a way of life, and disruption is what saves us from our own attention blindness. Right now, we are often blind to how much how world has changed and how essential it is to change our institutions to support that change.
Davidson’s argument resonates with some of the positions I cited in that recent post, which are generally more comfortable with the role of digital devices, not simply because they are pro-technology but because they envision a different model of learning.
I’ll combine the virtues of these two positions in a followup post…here, at least, let’s agree that there are two important points of view worth our consideration. It’s not as simple as many apparently want it to be.
*1/12/17 update: See here (“Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom”) for one more example of the supposed obviousness of banning devices (or, as per the title, perhaps just laptops? the author seems unaware of the ubiquity of mobile devices). This prominent NYT article was, thankfully, revised when their Big Statistic that devices lower test performance by 18% (certainly a worrisome figure) was revised to the correct number of, um, 1.7%.
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