Becoming 21st century goldfish

The decline of attention spans.

Our constant need for information, communication, and visual stimulation had to begin somewhere. We weren’t always so obsessed with communication speed and flow as we are now – were we?

I’d say no. I’m sure that my Grandparents had no trouble with not having a smartphone and ipad to keep them busy. In fact, I remember sitting for hours with my Grandma when I was little and she would watch The Lawrence Welk Show[1] every single Saturday night. My husband and I recently watched an episode of Lawrence Welk just so he could see what I “suffered” through on those Saturday nights being babysat by Grandma.

If you aren’t familiar with the Lawrence Welk Show let me tell you… it’s an old TV song and dance variety show hosted by a man named Lawrence Welk and it aired on PBS. It’s an hour long and is filled with people performing by tap dancing, waltzing, singing, and doing short skits dressed in the ultimate 60’s garb with teased hair to the nines!  Terribly boring, I know. But it’s fascinating to watch it now and compare it with our standards for the 21^st century television programming.

When we watched the show recently we were amazed at how long the scene shots were. There were long periods of the same shot (a minute or longer). No angle changes, no camera changes – just the same shot. The average shot length (ASL) now is typically around 4-5 seconds in length[2]. The screen is constantly changing scenes, shots, people, music etc. We bounce from one media stimulation to the next.

As Kelton Cobb states in his book Theology and Popular Culture, “it [TV] flattens out the momentous and the trivial. In one weekend of television viewing, one can see more drama, human tragedy, comedy, feats of spectacular achievement, and sexual escapades than most of our ancestors would have seen in a year or even their lifetimes. And these highs and lows flow out of the set in a steady stream, interrupted only by ad pitches to buy the sponsor’s products” (p. 38). 


While some argue that TV is one of the main culprits for shortening our attention spans; others argue that it is the Internet.

In 2002, BBC published an article about the impact of the digital age on our attention spans[3]. Researchers found that even if a website is engaging “most online viewers spend less than 60 seconds at an average site”. There is so much information and media available that users don’t know when to stop searching. We have a tendency to just keep bouncing from website to website and from link to link gathering more information.  The article also argues that the web has helped decrease our attention span so much that it can now dip down to only 9 seconds.

9 seconds until we move onto the next thing, the next link, the next page, the next blog, the next news story…. There is always a next in the information age. It is important to point out that goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds. Yes, Goldfish. Have we become as attention deficit as goldfish?

So maybe it isn’t all bad though. Maybe we are becoming super-humans with the ability to research (or “google”) anything. We have the world at our finger tips. Are we less just for having the shorter attention spans that go with it? Perhaps we’ll delve into the more positive side of multi tasking in the next post….

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[1] http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=lawrencewelk

[2] http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/statistical_analysis.html

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1834682.stm

The "flat affect" of digital communication

I thought it worth discussing the generational effects of communication multitasking and how it may be affecting other aspects of daily life. In a recent article by Camille Paglia, she discusses how Lady Gaga’s fans don’t need someone who is real and expressional. Her fans, or her “little monsters” are used to a flat affect. They are so interwoven into a life of texting, emailing, and chatting that perhaps they’ve forgotten (or maybe have never even known) what face to face communication can look like.

As she states “Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…” [1]

So is this the case for tweens and teens… Are they so wound up in their digital communication devices that they are so far removed from face to face communication that a fake, plastic performer is just as good?  Is this a generation of people who’s emotions are visible only through emoticons and “LOL’s”?  And what has led to this?

Paglia points out that the population of Gaga monsters are “marooned” in technology leaving a desperate void of emotions. The information overload points to an inability to process the important. Emotions, sex, and intimate feelings are blasted through every medium possible toning down the importance of such things. Multitasking appears to be assisting in desensitizing humanness.

Much research has been done on the effects of viewing violence through media and how it can desensitize people towards violent acts [2].

However, what about media as a whole? Is our obsession with consuming media 24 hours a day through an array of multifaceted channels causing us to become desensitized?

In a Psychology Today article, the author points out that she puts her kids on a “media diet” each school year which includes no TV during the week. Imagine if a typical American 16 year old was weaned off TV for a week – it could crash a social life! [3]

The Zur Institute points out ‘Spending countless hours a day, everyday, on the Internet or in online gaming can interfere with young people's emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual development.”[4]  Digital age Natives (as the media addicted generation is called) are potentially hampering their ability to engage in face to face discussion, express themselves emotionally (other than on a handheld device of sorts), or interact with friends on a deeper level.

How many times have we witnessed someone texting someone who is within vocal range. I myself am guilty – 2 years ago I had a neighbor who was a good friend of mine – she lived right next door, but sometimes it was just easier; more convenient to text her. Are we losing our ability to communicate in full phrases? Have shorthand text messaging and emails become the norm?

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[1] http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

[2] http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6500/Desensitization-and-Media-Effects.html

[3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-slow/201009/managing-your-kids-media-appetite

[4] http://www.zurinstitute.com/teenviolence.html

A generation of "poor performers..." ?

·         In 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. (a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation).

·         According to the Generation M study, about 15% of 7th–12th graders say they use another medium “most of the time” they’re using at least three out of the four media in the study (TV, reading, videogames, and computers). These are considered “heavy” media multitaskers (http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7593.pdf)

·         Today’s 8-18 year old age group is so good at multitasking using media that they are able to actually pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into 7½ hours.

http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia012010nr.cfm

I’d like to take a step back and revisit the original inspiration for this blog, the June 11^th, 2010 story on NPR titled Does Multitasking Lead To A More Productive Brain? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127771658

 

In this show the host, Ira Flatow, interviews two experts on the concept, Clifford Nass a professor of Communications at Standford University; and ADAM GAZZALEY the Director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center, University of California, San Francisco.

The pose the question “Does multitasking lead to a more productive brain”? In response to this question Dr. Gazzaley points out that “it's becoming increasingly viewed that our brains are not highly adapted for multiple streams of information at the same time but rather focusing at a particular direction.” He goes on to say that when we multitask we have to “switch” in our brains as well “and with each switch, there's a cost, a cost in performance that occurs”

Professor Nass even goes on to say that with studies on multitasking, the people who think they multitask the best are actually the worst at it.

One of the biggest concerns the show brought up was that upcoming generations; tweens, teens, and 20’s, have all been raised multitasking. The growing concern is that there is not long term data to show what this means for people. Are people of younger generations developing a different cognitive learning pattern? Is it for the better or the worse?

Based on Dr. Gazzaley’s reflection on multitasking causing poor performance, I’m tempted to state that “yes, of course! And it’s affecting our communication!”

But I’m not so sure it is.

I’m a multitasker and I certainly don’t want to admit that I’m performing poorly texting a friend while listening to another friend’s story. But maybe I am.

The brain is a complex instrument and being raised to multitasking is perhaps a good brain development activity. Maybe we are learning to stretch our brains in new ways. Or maybe we are raising an entire generation or people who have a poor attention span and performance record.

As Professor Nass states, “it seems that the developmental implications are very worrisome. As I said, the children, we look at college students primarily, although we're expanding to many other populations, students who have had a great deal of multitasking in their younger lives, and what we're seeing is, again, the ones who do it more lose some fundamental abilities”

Thoughts?

Our drug of choice…

Let’s talk about what multi tasking is and how it can affect us. Mirriam-Webster defines mulit-tasking as “performing more than one job (or task) at once” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/multitasking). We’ve developed a knack to cram as much as possible into each day. We can communicate with everyone from our life using 20 different technologies all at once. Are we better for it?

For a few minutes I thought I was not multi-tasking while writing this post. I am sitting in a study lab at Princeton with no TV on, no phone ringing…. Oh wait…. No matter how I try to avoid it, I seem to not be able to do only one thing at once. I’m actually sitting in the computer lab listening to music on my iphone, drinking coffee, texting a friend periodically all with 5 different tabs open on my computer with my email, facebook, and a link for school. Yikes. I feel tricked!  I wonder how my seeming inability to do only one thing affects me.

What is interesting to me about multitasking in our society is that it is usually viewed as a good thing; someone who can multitask must be intelligent. “I can multitask! Hire me! I’ll write the office newsletter while standing on my head chewing gum on the phone with a client!” Time and time again I’ve seen job postings requiring that the candidate be “good at multitasking”. So is multitasking such a good thing? And when did our society become so obsessed with this concept?

As Britanica Blogger, Nicholas Carr states in his 2009 post We’re Always Multitasking, and That’s the Problem,

” …when we multitask we sacrifice understanding and learning. We do more but know less. And the more tasks we juggle and the more quickly we switch between them, the higher the cognitive price we pay.

The problem today is not that we multitask. We’ve always multitasked. The problem is that we’re always in multitasking mode. “

Multitasking is not a new thing… we were born to multitask. But as Mr. Carr points out it’s like we’ve flipped our “multitasking switch” and we seem to run our lives in a perpetual multitasking mode. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine found that today’s workers are interrupted every 3- 20 minutes and about half the time they interrupt themselves to do a new task (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf). It seems we like to fragment our lives to almost unhealthy levels. Maybe we get bored? Perhaps we were trained to fragment and multitask?

So how does this affect us and our messages? BBC reported a study done by Hewlett Packard in 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4318351.stm). In this study HP found that 62% of people checked their work messages and email while at home or away from the office. I myself am guilty of this and I have no idea why! I go on vacation and can’t seem to leave my work at work. This same study also found that the excessive use of technology actually lowered intelligence. In fact, while multitasking individuals suffer an IQ drop twice that of someone using marijuana.

Yes, we just compared the effects of multitasking to the effects of using a drug.

Has multitasking become the 21^st century drug of choice? Are you addicted?