No Place (Setting) for Distraction

The dining version of a classroom. Meals and classes should be considered a brief vacation from constant distraction. The lulls in conversation are when the best ideas are allowed to flourish.

Lagniappe

A recent article in Forbes includes social-media addition as Habit #9 of 14 habits that can get a person fired. This is a bit tricky, since mastery of social media is often important in finding a job and in advancing the goals of an organization. But it can very easily get out of hand, and interfere with the all-important matter of being present.

November 2017 update: Writing for the New York Times, Professor Susan Dynarski makes a strong case for excluding laptops from classes and meetings, even if they are being used primarily for note-taking.

Textual Resistance

A couple of years ago, I acquired an Android phone -- what I call a semi-smart phone -- just because I sometimes found it difficult to check messages while traveling. My old phone had just enough Internet capability to frustrate me. The new phone was adequate for "occasionally" checking in.

I've not gotten to the point of the fellow in this scene from The New Yorker, but I can certainly empathize with him -- and with my students who cannot resist furtively (they think) checking messages during class. Connections to the outside have forever altered the nature of connections on the inside.

As I have explained in Dose of Distraction -- with the help of another cartoonist -- the brain's craving for stimulation threatens both focused learning and good manners. As someone who now has the world at my Android fingertips, I understand the challenge that phones -- especially the smart and semi-smart kinds -- pose for students. Of course, empathy and acceptance are not the same thing; these are challenges I expect students to resist.

And of course texting is not the only challenging distraction ...

Destination: Attention

Image: Shamelessly lifted from Facebook.

Smart phones have brought the whole world into classrooms and other face-to-face meetings, putting the pressure on all of us to be interesting, second-by-second. Where we might once have competed with daydreams, comic books, passed notes, inside jokes, or other sources of distraction, we now compete with the WHOLE WORLD being carried in the pockets of our students or coworkers.

Who can compete with that? Sometimes, not even the WHOLE WORLD itself!

See my Dose of Distraction post for more snarky humor and serious discussion of attention in a distracted age.

Fires and Explosions? What Fires and Explosions?

In my honors class yesterday we were discussing, among other things, alternatives to fossil fuels. Renewable or perpetual sources such as wind and solar power engender some skepticism because they are considered new and untested. In pointing out that despite some limitations and possible inconveniences, they are inherently safer that our petroleum economy, I cited recent tanker-train accidents such as the explosion last week in West Virginia, which also spilled oil into a local river.  I mentioned it in comparison to the far worse petroleum explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in which the downtown was destroyed and 43 people were killed.

None of the students had heard of either event.

The good news is that they were more stunned than I was that two such important stories had escaped their notice. These are honors students who had signed up for a class on climate change, and yet neither of these stories had penetrated the layers of distraction in which so many of us are shrouded.

We spoke briefly about Bread & Circus -- the attention diverted to everything that is not important, as I wrote about previously with respect to Bristol Palin in 2010 and WalMart in 2013.

Further good news; these students are now especially keen to pursue a more substantive media diet.

Lagniappe

Atlantic reporter Derek Thompson writes that my students are far from alone in being disconnected from traditional news sources. Journalism in the Age of the Accidental News Junkie describes how social media has become both a platform and a filter for news, even as traditional reporting remains important as a point of origin.

Mexican Countries

By now, this screenshot will be familiar to many:

Fox News screenshot, as reported by Newsweek
and everybody else.

This filled my weekend newsfeed, an some have asked for my thoughts on it. Here is what I posted in response to a query from a BSU alumnus:

I have a few thoughts, in no particular order, other than the first:

• I am glad so many of my friends thought of my efforts in geographic education when they saw this.
• I am also reminded that our most prolific geographer -- the late, great Dr. Harm de Blij -- told us that he wrote 1,000 letters a year to public officials and the editors of various programs and publications about errors of this kind or erroneous maps. Some stand out more than others, but many are made. Dr. de Blij, incidentally, was the first person to put a map of Kuwait on television when Iraq invaded it; he knew instantly that it would be an example of Americans learning geography through war.

And some more thoughts:

• We wonder why Americans are so bad at geography, but we don't actually teach it much. The world is big and complicated; it needs more than a quick class in middle school. Massachusetts is about to increase it from a miniscule part of the curriculum to a tiny part. We need more, but someone in state government is working very hard against us.
• It remains illegal to become a certified high-school geography teacher in Massachusetts.
• Seeing this post did motivate me to get the publicity together for our next advocacy day (April 17, 2019) at the State House.

Photo by BSU Alumna Ashley (Costa) Harris
Massachusetts State House 2012
As published in National Geographic's
Geography for Life

And two more thoughts about the story:

• The xenophobia of the people involved is giving the quote more attention.
• The attention is a distraction from the important part of the story, which is the application of hamfisted negotiation tactics to a matter of extreme complexity in the international sphere.

Lagniappe

My doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies can now be called Mexico & Stuff.

Antidote

The essential site Latino Rebels provides an antidote to the ignorance, in the form of a map (hurrah!) and a poem that is as instructive as it is tragic: Central American (In)Visibility.

Map: Latino Rebels

Slamming the Phone

A friend shared this thoughtful bit of poetry recently.

He introduced it with the phrase "guilty as charged," and I responded likewise. Guilt is not the goal, though; rather, pausing to think about how we can reduce the noise and increase the signal; how we can create space for attention by setting aside distractions. (All of the links in this article are to previous posts on this blog, relating to several aspects of our distraction culture.)

This friend is my age (well, almost) and we are both as tempted by the interuptions of technology as teenagers. In fact, I only see this friend in real life a couple times a year, so the technology itself is an important nexus of our friendship  And even this work by the poet Prince Ea came to me by way of Facebook, and features various ways of sharing it on Facebook and other platforms.

But still, his point is well taken and even if it is too late too unplug, we can be more mindful of how and when we connect.

I think the best place in a car for a cellphone is the trunk. For dinner at home, the best place is another room. For dinner in a restaurant, the OFF switch can be employed (I think every phone has one), as it can be in classrooms or when on a walk with friends.

We are flooded with micronews, cute news, strange news, staged news, and other forms of ever-less-relevant information that we miss the truly big stories.

The focus on our online life can be more than distracting, though: it can warp our priorities. On the same day I saw this video, I learned of the death of a dolphin in Argentina as a direct result of beachgoers who valued a selfie with the dolphin more than the dolphin itself.

With some effort, we can be smarter than this goldfish. Maybe.

Dose of Distraction

(C) Wiley GOCOMICS.COM/NONSEQUITUR

I have developed a terrible driving habit in recent years. When I notice another driver failing to blend with traffic, I look over to see whether they are chatting on the phone or texting. That is to say, I allow myself to be distracted by their distracted driving. More than half the time, if someone is drifting in the lane or driving 10 mph below the speed limit, it is because their brain is elsewhere.

Massachusetts typically ranked 49th in driving ability before we were able to bring our social networks and the entire Internet into the driver's seat. It is amazing that we could have such terrible driving without digital assistance.

As the cartoonist Wiley so beautifully illustrates in yesterday's comic, the desire to be distracted now extends to walking. This year my university campus has had some very complicated driving and walking patterns because of construction, but a high percentage of both walkers and drivers continued to move through the parking lots using only a minimal percentage of their brain cells.

And that is just the problem -- most of the time, walking and driving do not require much of our brains, which crave activity. So we seek to fill the void with other kinds of engagement. This is why cars have radios, for example. The difficulty is that every once in a while, a driving or walking situation requires much MORE thinking, perhaps instantaneously. A ball rolls out into traffic, the car in front of us suddenly swerves, or a cliff opens up in our path.

If we are listening to a radio when this sudden shift in attention is needed, it is not a problem: our brain simply shifts attention to where it is needed for a second or a minute and then shifts back to the radio. I often have the experience, for example, of missing a key point in a radio broadcast because it comes just as my attention is needed elsewhere. The danger of social-media distractions is that politeness makes it more difficult to surrender that attention, and so we are more likely to keep our focus on the conversation when it is needed in the car or on the path.

The same applies in classes and business meetings, of course. The reason students -- or employees -- text when they should be listening is that sometimes the conversation in the classroom or meeting room only requires a few brain cells. If the professor or a coworker is saying something that we already know -- or that we think we already know -- we tend to reach for something else to do with our spare brain cells. If that something is a doodle pad or even a small puzzle, we can easily snap back to attention when called upon. But if in the palm of our hands we hold a connection to most of our friends and the contents of countless libraries, it is easy for our minds to be transported far from the space our bodies occupy. When called upon in such circumstances, we have no answers; our minds were elsewhere.

For these reasons, if our brain might be needed, the only safe dose for social media is no dose at all.



Lagniappe
Most people who watch the video above are likely to focus on the dramatic conclusion. I always look for the moment -- a few seconds before that -- when the instructor clearly loses his train of thought. Just as texting distracts other drivers who wonder why someone would type and drive at the same time, even the most subtle texting in class or a meeting will distract the speaker eventually. Some speakers soldier on, just as they might pretend to ignore a mosquito, but no speaker is unaware of the texting that goes on around them. For this reason, texting (even in one's crotch, seemingly out of sight) undermines the work of educators and other public speakers.

Beyond Lagniappe
We've recently been watching -- and re-watching -- a lot of Hitchcock, who had the luxury of predeceasing all of this foolishness. Still, his persona weighs in on the issue by way of this spoof:

Here is the real horror story: the students to whom I showed this did not understand it.