a life in 140 characters?

I have to turn off my internet to get any good writing done. In fact, I often write by hand just so I don't even have the option of turning the internet back on. Because I am a part of the information-overloaded, obsessively multitasking generation. As the PBS documentary "Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century" pointed out - we're trying to do everything, all the time. We (my generation) proclaim - "We can text, reply to emails, gchat, and take notes on a lecture, all at once." But we can't, not really. The PBS documentary isn't the only one reminding us that we can't. We should be reminding ourselves -

There are a multitude of studies out there showing that when we multitask, we're not learning to the best of our abilities. Our knowledge becomes less flexible - I would imagine because we're simply storing information, rather than forming knowledge through internal connections between past experience and knowledge and the new information. Multitasking through various kinds of media give us feelings of control, efficiency, engagement, and assimilation, but can throw us into chaos, inefficiency, disengagement, enslavement. (Rohm, Sultan, and Bardhi, "Multitasking Youth", Marketing Management, November/December 2009)

So how is this changing how we learn and think? And how is it changing how young people interact with their educations and each other? One article I read included comments from a professor who noted that while students' mistakes haven't increased, but their interest in correcting the mistakes has decreased. (Ralston, "Facebook Affects Student Writing" The Battalion. March 23, 2010. Accessed March 14, 2011. )


So as we rapidly shift from gchat to Facebook to friend-emails to professional-emails to essay writing, we're (hopefully) code switching. But the rapid movement from medium to medium may also be stunting our attention spans, keeping us from maintaining (or even developing) the ability to read complex, involved texts. Dialectical reading takes focus, time, and practice. When I'm reading something difficult, something dense, I turn off the music, turn off the internet and prop up my feet to really dig into the text. But I do worry that fitting our lives into Twitter and Facebook statuses, skimming twenty or thirty articles in the morning to get my news of the day, is stunting or warping our expression and experience of media. I have a hard time sitting still for two minutes - the need to be constantly engaged, constantly stimulated is a handicap that I think youth today are especially vulnerable to and must struggle against.

http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/