by Clay Shirky
I teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and
am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a
pretty unlikely candidate for internet censor, but I have just asked the
students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and
phones in class.
I came late and reluctantly to this
decision — I have been teaching classes about the internet since
1998, and I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards
technology use in the classroom. This was partly because the subject of my
classes made technology use feel organic, and when device use went well, it was
great. Then there was the competitive aspect — it’s my job to be
more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating.
And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults,
even if young ones — time management is their job, not mine.
Despite these rationales, the
practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse
over time. The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though
it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group
of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change
seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices
themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of the
classroom encounter.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that when
I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids
down’, in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air
into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense
of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting — when we do it by
choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.
So this year, I moved from
recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to
the class rules: “Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment
requires it.)” Here’s why I finally switched from ‘allowed unless by request’
to ‘banned unless required’.
We’ve known for some time that
multi-tasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is
especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.
This effect takes place over more than
one time frame — even when multi-tasking doesn’t significantly degrade
immediate performance, it can havenegative long-term effects on “declarative memory”,
the kind of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what they
learned from earlier studying. (Multi-tasking thus makes the famous “learned it
the day before the test, forgot it the day after” effect even more pernicious.)
People often start multi-tasking
because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never
materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect.
(Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the
period of work.) This side-effect is enough to keep people committed to
multi-tasking despite worsening the very thing they set out to improve.
On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t
even exercise task-switching as a skill. A study from Stanford reports that heavy
multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on.
(“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put
it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability
to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their
abilities through over-consumption.
This is all just the research on
multi-tasking as a stable mental phenomenon. Laptops, tablets and phones — the devices on
which the struggle between focus and distraction is played out daily — are making the
problem progressively worse. Any designer of software as a service has an
incentive to be as ingratiating as they can be, in order to compete with other
such services. “Look what a good job I’m doing! Look how much value I’m
delivering!”
This problem is especially acute with
social media, because on top of the general incentive for any service to be
verbose about its value, social information is immediately and emotionally
engaging. Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost
irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework.
(“Your former lover tagged a photo you are in” vs. “The Crimean War was the
first conflict significantly affected by use of the telegraph.” Spot the
difference?)
Worse, the designers of operating
systems have every incentive to be arms dealers to the social media firms.
Beeps and pings and pop-ups and icons, contemporary interfaces provide an extraordinary
array of attention-getting devices, emphasis on “getting.” Humans are incapable
of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is
strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re
focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near
you?)
The form and content of a Facebook
update may be almost irresistible, but when combined with a visual alert in
your immediate peripheral vision, it is—really, actually, biologically—impossible
to resist. Our visual and emotional systems are faster and more powerful than
our intellect; we are given to automatic responses when either system receives
stimulus, much less both. Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts
on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles
with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.
Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here.
In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider
(the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is
far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the
ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.
After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped
thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay
attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to
pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of
which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This
is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a
novice.)
Regarding teaching as a shared
struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they
focus — its me and them working together to help defend their
precious focus against outside distractions. I have a classroom full of riders
and elephants, but I’m trying to teach the riders.
And while I do, who is whispering to
the elephants? Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Snapchat, Tumblr,
Pinterest, the list goes on, abetted by the designers of the Mac, iOS, Windows,
and Android. In the classroom, it’s me against a brilliant and well-funded army
(including, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, many of my former students.) These designers
and engineers have every incentive to capture as much of my students’ attention
as they possibly can, without regard for any commitment those students may have
made to me or to themselves about keeping on task.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course.
Even a passing familiarity with the literature on programming, a famously
arduous cognitive task, will acquaint you with stories of people falling into
code-flow so deep they lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep.
Computers are not inherent sources of distraction — they can in fact
be powerful engines of focus — but latter-day versions have been designed to be,
because attention is the substance which makes the whole consumer internet go.
The fact that hardware and software is
being professionally designed to distract was the first thing that made me
willing to require rather than merely suggest that students not use devices in
class. There are some counter-moves in the industry right now — software that
takes over your screen to hide distractions, software that prevents you from
logging into certain sites or using the internet at all, phones with Do Not
Disturb options — but at the moment these are rear-guard actions. The
industry has committed itself to an arms race for my students’ attention, and
if it’s me against Facebook and Apple, I lose.
The final realization — the one that
firmly tipped me over into the “No devices in class” camp — was this: screens
generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke. A paper with the
blunt title Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both
Users and Nearby Peers says it all:
We found that
participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a
test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in
direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who
were not. The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a
significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be
detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.
I have known, for years, that the
basic research on multi-tasking was adding up, and that for anyone trying to do
hard thinking (our spécialité de la maison, here at college),
device use in class tends to be a net negative. Even with that consensus,
however, it was still possible to imagine that the best way to handle the
question was to tell the students about the research, and let them make up
their own minds.
The “Nearby Peers” effect, though,
shreds that rationale. There is no laissez-faire attitude to
take when the degradation of focus is social. Allowing laptop use in class is
like allowing boombox use in class — it lets each
person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.
Groups also have a rider-and-elephant
problem, best described by Wilfred Bion in an oddly written but influential
book, Experiences in
Groups. In it, Bion, who practiced group therapy, observed how
his patients would unconsciously coordinate their actions to defeat the purpose
of therapy. In discussing the ramifications of this, Bion observed that
effective groups often develop elaborate structures, designed to keep their
sophisticated goals from being derailed by more primal group activities like
gossiping about members and vilifying non-members.
The structure of a classroom, and
especially a seminar room, exhibits the same tension. All present have an
incentive for the class to be as engaging as possible; even though engagement
often means waiting to speak while listening to other people wrestle with
half-formed thoughts, that’s the process by which people get good at managing
the clash of ideas.
Against that long-term value, however,
each member has an incentive to opt out, even if only momentarily. The smallest
loss of focus can snowball, the impulse to check WeChat quickly and then put
the phone away leading to just one message that needs a reply right now, and
then, wait, whathappened last night??? (To the people who say
“Students have always passed notes in class”, I reply that old-model notes
didn’t contain video and couldn’t arrive from anywhere in the world at 10
megabits a second.)
I have the good fortune to teach in
cities richly provisioned with opportunities for distraction. Were I a
19-year-old planning an ideal day in Shanghai, I would not put “Listen to an
old guy talk for an hour” at the top of my list. (Vanity prevents me from
guessing where it would go.) And yet I can teach the students
things they are interested in knowing, and despite all the literature on joyful
learning, from Maria Montessori on down, some parts of making your brain do new
things are just hard.
Indeed, college contains daily
exercises in delayed gratification. “Discuss early modern European print
culture” will never beat “Sing karaoke with friends” in a straight fight, but
in the long run, having a passable Rihanna impression will be a less useful
than understanding how media revolutions unfold.
Anyone distracted in class doesn’t
just lose out on the content of the discussion, they create a sense of permission
that opting out is OK, and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their
peers. In an environment like this, students need support for the better angels
of their nature (or at least the more intellectual angels), and they need
defenses against the powerful short-term incentives to put off complex,
frustrating tasks. That support and those defenses don’t just happen, and they
are not limited to the individual’s choices. They are provided by social
structure, and that structure is disproportionately provided by the professor,
especially during the first weeks of class.
This is, for me, the biggest change — not a switch in
rules, but a switch in how I see my role. Professors are at least as bad at
estimating how interesting we are as the students are at estimating their
ability to focus. Against oppositional models of teaching and learning, both
negative—Concentrate, or lose out!—and positive—Let me attract your
attention!—I’m coming to see student focus as a collaborative
process. It’s me and them working to create a classroom where the students
who want to focus have the best shot at it, in a world increasingly hostile to
that goal.
Some of the students will still opt
out, of course, which remains their prerogative and rightly so, but if I want
to help the ones who do want to pay attention, I’ve decided it’s time to admit
that I’ve brought whiteboard markers to a gun fight, and act accordingly.
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