I'm sitting here in a lecture. I should be listening, but instead, I'm writing. I'm doing this because I just thought of a flip side to the debate over attention span, distraction, and the use of networked media by young people. Even if we ban the laptops in lecture, their/our minds might have been altered in some way that makes lectures like this pointless.
Sure, maybe people who use networked media a lot are accustomed to instant gratification (the emphasis being on "gratification": experiences that offer pleasure). And yes, media experiences are briefer than ever before.
But maybe this just means they're engaged in the expression and consumption of important ideas in a more efficient manner. Rather than thinking of networked media users' listening, reading, and thinking skills as being hobbled by networked media, they may just have become more efficient at finding and using relevant information. Thus, when they are forced to sit through a linear lecture with a lot of information that is not relevant and cannot be searched or scanned, they tune out, not out of boredom or lack of discipline necessarily, but because they prefer a more efficient flow of information.
So we sit here, slackjawed, unable to concentrate on a lecture. Whose fault is this: the speaker or the listeners? My hunch is that its a little bit of both. Of course, those who use networked media a lot would tend to think the problem is with the old fogeys who still lecture in the same way, insist that we consume information in the same way we did hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Those who do not use networked media (the tendency to use such media more likely being an effect of age cohort and/or income than an effect of holding any ideological disposition; the ideological disposition is a justification for an existing behavior, not the other way around) would tend to think that young people cannot think with the same depth and rigor and are thus intellectually stunted by their near-constant use of networked media.
I think what we need to isolate are the types of media experience or content. If consumers of information choose indulgent experiences over virtue experiences, then they are at fault. But if there isn't a significant different in virtue/vice value that one seeks out when using networked media, then perhaps producers of information should be more efficient in the manner in which they convey information.
I keep returning to the questions: What does it mean to be efficient communicators? What is the goal of communicating information? There is a category of media use referred to by Uses and Gratifications researchers as "information seeking." Its time to start scrutinizing that category and splitting it up into smaller ones. So much of what we do now is information seeking, but clearly, some of it is in our collective long-term interest and some of it is not. Some of what might look like dawdling is really the kind of creative play that leads to new ideas. And some of it really is dawdling.
Two approaches might help us tell the difference between the two: experiments that restrict people's access to parts of the vast quantity of information and detailed tracking of people's work using networked media, tracing the paths of new ideas to certain types of free-association information seeking.
