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Narrative 1: Distracting Gadgets and Attention Deficits in Schools

"Now that computers are a staple in schools around the country, perhaps the machines should come with a warning label for teachers: 'Beware: Students may no longer hear a word you say.'

Today 80 percent of public schools have high-speed Internet access in at least one classroom, according to Market Data Retrieval, an education research company. Among colleges, 69 percent have classroom Internet access and 70 percent have wireless networks. Students start tapping away behind laptop lids with no way for professors to know if they are taking notes or checking Hotmail.

'I've never been in a lecture where I haven't seen someone checking their e-mail when they were supposed to be doing stuff,' said Bill Walsh, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instant messages, news tickers and games like solitaire beckon too.

Joe Huber, the technology coordinator for the public schools in Greenwood, Ind., said that teachers routinely complain about gadget-distraction among students. 'It is a huge problem with anyone who teaches with any kind of technology,' he said.

Even in rooms without computers or Internet access, students have other devices to draw their attention away from academics. Cellphones may be prohibited at many schools, but that doesn't stop students from putting them on vibrate and trading text messages under their desks. That is, when they aren't fiddling with their organizers or music players. Teachers have started to fight back. All agree that the best weapon against attention deficit is the same one that worked before the dawn of computers: strong teaching. But new strategies don't hurt, either. Some teachers have found, in fact, that the best defense against the distractions of technology is other technology. Here are five examples of teachers who are fighting fire with fire."

Counter-strategies adopted by teachers:

- use of (interactive) games in classroom

- threat to reboot without saving assignment

- classroom layout that allows teacher to watch students' laptops screens (MIT)

- remote controlled student computers, e.g. with option to "freeze" operations when teacher explains

From Lisa Guernsey, When Gadgets Get in the Way, N.Y. Times, Aug. 19, 2004, at 1.

Narrative 2: Reliability of New Intermediaries

[- Wikipedia: John Seigenthaler (involvement in JFK's assassination), Adam Curry ("inventor" of podcasting), danah boyd (how to fix your own bio), Tron controversy] 24129770415337984575495

Problems

The Information Quality Challenge: (from Urs' essay draft)

a) information quality = âreference to a set of characteristics aimed at stating whether a âmessageâ meets the functional, cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical requirements of different stakeholders, such as information creators, administrators, users, experts, etc.â

b) Current safeguards for information quality mostly apply to traditional (mass-scale, demand-driven) media (dominated by small number of professionals in commercial, hierarchical, centralized media companies):

- Indirect ex ante regulation of broadcasting, for instance, in Europe

- Code of Practices (e.g. UK), Press Councils, Ombudsmen

- Code of Ethics, voluntarily adopted by news organizations and media companies

- Ex post interventions, like lawsuits against libel, defamation

c) Now, new modes of information production (large number of non-professionals involved; highly decentralized; different set of principles and motivations)

- Large-scale context shifts

- High level of access to information

- Quality assessment at the edges (users)

Attention Deficit Disorder/Cognitive Overload:

From an cant you pay attention anymore/2008-1022_3-5637632.html interview with psychiatrist Edward Hallowell

Q: What is ADT?

A: It's sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it's a condition induced by modern life, in which you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you're doing so much or trying to do so much, it's as if you're juggling one more ball than you possibly can.

Q: Are some people just better at multitasking than others?

A: No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing. When it looks like you're multitasking--you're looking at one TV screen and another TV screen and you're talking on the telephone--your attention has to shift from one to the other. You're brain literally can't multitask. You can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. You're switching back and forth between the two. So you're paying less concerted attention to either one.

I think in general, why some people can do well at what they call multitasking is because the effort to do it is so stimulating. You get adrenaline pumping that helps focus your mind. What you're really doing is focusing better at brief spurts on each stimulus. So you don't get bored with either one.

Q: Do you think this is a generational thing? Kids now are growing up with e-mail, cell phones and so on. Maybe they'll be able to cope better than we do?

A: I think maybe they'll be more adept with these tools when they get to the workplace, but I think the same principles will apply. How you allocate your time and your attention is crucial. What you pay attention to and for how long really makes a difference. If you're just paying attention to trivial e-mails for the majority of your time, you're wasting time and mental energy. It's the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you're not. You're just treading water.

From Seven, Life Interrupted, Seattle Times (2004)

"'We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before,' says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. 'I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death.'

This is of particular interest when it comes to children who have grown up in the fast lane where Web pages that take more than five seconds to load are considered lame. Is the speed and ease compromising their attention spans? Their perspective? Their humanity? Even their work ethic? Or are we just threatened that they will lap us old fogies?

Little is understood about the Information Age's effect on this generation, but it is a burgeoning area of research. Ratey wonders if kids would read 'The Red Badge of Courage' to complete their homework or simply comb the Internet for essays explaining it all for them."

From Jiang et al.: We weren't made to multitask (2004):

"It's readily apparent that handling two things at once is much harder than handling one thing at a time. Spend too much time trying to juggle more than one objective and you'll end up wanting to get rid of all your goals besides sleeping. The question is, though, what makes it so hard to process two things at once?

Two theories try to explain this phenomenon: "passive queuing" and "active monitoring." The former says that information has to line up for a chance at being processed at some focal point of the brain, while the latter suggests that the brain can process two things at once - it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate. Recent research from MIT points to the former as an explanation.

Yuhong Jiang, Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher, in a study (...) examined the brain activity involved in multitasking. They gave people two simple tasks. Task one was identifying shapes, and for some subjects, task two was identifying letters, for others it was identifying colors. The subjects were forced to switch from one task to the other in either one and a half seconds or one tenth of a second. When they had to switch faster, subjects would take as much as twice as long to respond than when switching more slowly.

Using MRI technology, Jiang, Saxe and Kanwisher examined subjects' brain activity while performing these tasks. They observed no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished."

Digital amnesia: somewhat counter-intuitively, huge amounts of information are simply forgotten or cannot be read anymore after some time; Stewart Brand: âInformation lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first.â; "digital dark age"

Reliability of new navigators: how to dissect relevant from irrelevant information? (see wikipedia cases)

"Digital me": fragmentation of audiences, implications for DNs' understanding of democracy (cp. Sunstein's Republic.com)

Alternative ways of framing the problem:

Attention as a scarce resource: problem can be framed as attention shortage, rather than information overload; how to allocate one's attention efficiently? (Franck, Goldhaber)

Adaptation to a new signaling environment: It seems that it is not necessarily the sheer increase in the amount of information and the diversity of sources that are the problem. For example, if someone put me in a helicopter and dropped me off in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, I would most likely suffer from severe information overload, too. Thus, another way of looking at the phenonemon could be through the lense of signaling theory. The adaptive challenge would be less in the tidal wave of information, but rather our ability to adequately interpret signals in online environments and differentiate reliable from deceptive signals. Judith Donath of MIT's Media Lab is writing a book on that approach.

Solutions

From Urs' essay draft:

Markets

- Reputation systems

- Quality labels, trustmarks

Social Norms

- Codes of conduct for bloggers, transparency

- Policies and guidelines at Wikipedia, Netiquette

Code

- Rating, filtering (ICRA, content advisor)

- Meta-data: tagging as a collaborative way to organize information according to folksonomies, (i.e. emergent grassroots taxonomies), see, e.g., Weinberger: Why Tagging Matters

- Specialized software to find content on hard drives, see Metz, PCMag: Conquer Information Overload (2003) (example of Jim Crowe, promoter at Atlantic records)

- Syndication, content aggregators, see Bradbury, FT: Might RSS Help To Solve Your Web Mess?

Law

- Disclosure standards in health regulation (quality standards, procedural requirements, etc.)

- Truth-in-advertising regulation

- Right to correct wrong information

Behavior/Learning (training the dot in the middle)

- Accelerated learning techniques to improve speed and comprehension, e.g. speed reading, see Fifield, FT: Cut through acres of type to the fast lane (2004)

Miscellaneous ideas:

Can increased collaboration aka Web 2.0 be interpreted as a response to information overload? If passive consumption becomes increasingly difficult and partly even unfeasible in view of an ever more diverse and abundant information environment, then web 2.0 strategies like tagging, remixing, mash-ups, and shared bookmarks can be regarded as essential tools to autonomously structure one's information environment. This reveals an interesting paradoxon of today's Internet: the very technologies we see at the heart of the information overload problem simultaneously provide us with the tools to combat it.