Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.25.11 | We wanted to point readers to HASTAC co-founder Cathy Davidson’s passionate blog post urging intellectuals to take more leadership in thinking about how we can “remake and redesign our habits and practices, our schools and workplaces” for the digital age.

Davidson is responding to a recent New York Times Magazine column by Executive Editor Bill Keller. In “The Twitter Trap,” Keller laments the “aggressive distractions of social media” and compares letting his 13-year-old daughter join Facebook to giving her “a pipe of crystal meth.”

Keller’s point is that Twitter is “ill-suited to real discussion”—and worse. “My inner worrywart,” he writes, “wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.”

Keller continues:

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from ... from ... wait, what was I saying?

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

The post, predictably, got a barrage of comments and critiques, some nicer than others. We reported earlier this month about a group of educators in the UK using Twitter for regular discussions—on everything from work/life balance to technology integration—who likely would also disagree with Keller about Twitter’s use as a space for meaningless dialogue, and there are countless other examples, but Davidson’s post is one of the best I read.

In “It’s Not the Technology, Stupid! Response to NYT ‘Twitter Trap’” (title is a play on James Carville’s ““It’s the economy, Stupid!”), Davidson presents a helpful reminder that we shouldn’t blame the technology itself; it’s what we do with the technology that matters.

Here are two facts: (1) we now know from the new science of attention and the most recent findings in neuroscience that our brain is not, as was previously thought, an inheritance that comes with all of its components fixed and certain; the brain is a learning organism and that means it is constantly changed by its environment, but what it experiences, and by its interactions. But (2) except in B-horror movies (“The Brain that Wouldn’t Die” or “The Brain from Planet Arous” and so forth), the brain doesn’t power itself and it doesn’t power us. The brain R us. That is, what we experience our brain experiences.

If we give it a steady diet of junk food or alcohol or Ritalin, it changes. If we give it a steady stream of “Jersey Shore,” that’s what it learns. If we give it a steady diet of item-response multiple choice testing (the ridiculous form of testing which, we know, does nothing except prepare students to do well on that particular form of testing), it learns how to think like those tests. If we inspire ourselves to curiosity, expose ourselves to challenges and then succeed and reinforce our ability to take challenges, our brain learns how to extrapolate from challenges. And if we spend all day on line doing idiotic things, then, well, that is what we learn how to do well—-spending all day on line doing idiotic things. We are what we do. Our brain is what it does.

But that’s not about technology, it’s about humanity. Between the human brain and the computer screen, comes us, our will, our desires, our habits, our training, our work, our incentives, our motivations, our culture, our society, our institutions, all of the things that make us human. It’s NOT the Technology, Stupid!  It is about what we—you and I—do with the technology. It always has been, it always will be.

Read Davidson’s full post at HASTAC.

Plus: For more on how technology is affecting society, read “Relationships in the Digital Age” at Spotlight, and “Teens and Technology: The New York Times on Distractions (and Tools) for Learning,” an analysis of a news story on teens and technology to which Cathy Davidson penned another excellent response.