4.13.11 | New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan frequently adds historical and cultural context to modern-day issues, and her recent post on internet addiction and cultural passions is no exception.
She starts by noting that certain diversions in life—such as television, video games and the internet—are pursued to the point where “we end up hating ourselves for loving them,” while other activities, including sports and following the news, fall under “duties of citizenship.”
Right there the line is drawn. Spend too much time with the former and your life is suspect, despite the fact that involvement in such activities can in fact be educational. A popular, if dated, internet addiction test contributes to the collective anxiety over wasting time online.
Heffernan then describes the life of a 20-year-old college student, Gabriela, whose digital habits sometimes include staying up until 4 a.m.:
“I’ll be on Facebook and see a status update of song lyrics, and I’ll Google them and find the band name, that I will subsequently Wikipedia and discover that the lead singer is interesting and briefly look at his Twitter and try his music on Grooveshark” — a music search engine and streaming service — “while looking at pictures of him on Tumblr” — the multimedia microblogging platform — “that will lead me to a meme I’ve never heard of that I’ll explore until I find hilarious photos I will subsequently share with friends of mine on Facebook.” Gabriela, who sometimes dresses in the futuristic Victoriana known as steampunk, also loves Webcomics, a site for graphic novels and comic books, and Neopets, a game that lets players care for virtual pets.
She indeed sleeps with her laptop in her bed, “partly so I can have my iTunes play my Sleep playlist.” Even on the Sabbath, when she refrains from Internet use for religious reasons, she talks and thinks about the Internet. She told me she considers surfing the Web not so much a regimen but “a state of being” that, like a meditative state, took her years to achieve.
“Aha. I’m no addiction expert,” Heffernan writes, “but Gabriela strikes me as a bright, self-effacing, religious young woman who keeps student hours and prefers logic games, jokes, graphic novels, trivia quizzes, music, Victoriana and socializing on Facebook to prefab pop bands.”
Of course, that’s not how all readers saw it. But first, here’s some welcomed context from Heffernan:
Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been represented as craven and diseased. Opera obsession leads to delinquency in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film “Diva”; an intense movie habit deepens the alienation of the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer.”
Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind, have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity.” The 18th-century worry about female literacy is not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls vulnerable to “predators”: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.” Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts (“I’m addicted to the symphony!”) or just absurd.
So why are authors and educators hellbent on using this shopworn rhetoric when it comes to Internet use?
Some commenters thought Heffernan’s analysis was too sunny and glossed over the potential problems of spending too much time online. Teachers in particular seemed to call attention to shortened attention spans and the inability to connect texts and ideas.
A comment highly recommended by other readers begins: “Clearly you haven’t taught high school students who have been up until 3:00 am ‘harmlessly’ surfing the web and playing endless violent video games like Halo. This is not one or two students; this is a significant minority. They arrive at school barely able to hold their heads up, with dark circles under their eyes. Sure, there have always been kids who have stayed up for their passions or addictions or whatever you want to call them. But these internet ‘addictions’ are a giant black hole of wasted time and, in general, wasted talent.”
And it goes on.
Another reader, taking the opposing view, writes: “The Internet is the new library, a sort of living, breathing, ever-expanding encyclopedia that allows me access to everything, from every era and ripple of time, all from a little slab of metal, glass and silicone.
“Yes, I can fall asleep with it, but why is that strange and falling asleep with a book not?”
Gabriela, the subject of Heffernan’s column, also weighs in, and addresses concerns that she is wasting her parent’s money at college (she’s in an honors program and was awarded full tuition) or that she probably doesn’t know a great deal about the world (she’s a journalism major interning with a local newspaper.).
“Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are very important to me. Fear not, Dear Readers,” she concludes.
Detractors may suggest that Gabriela is an exception, and most young people who spend as many hours online as Gabriela does aren’t nearly as engaged or self-directed. What this column clearly shows, however, is that assumptions about learning and engagement cannot be made simply by looking at the hours someone spends online or their participation on Facebook or Twitter.
And, perhaps more importantly, instead of seeing Gabriela as a exceptional exception, educators might start thinking about how we can turn more students into Gabrielas (and Shanis and Terrences—who have integrated digital media into every part of their lives and have become savvy media creators—and the many other teens making and remixing media at YOUmedia and Digital Youth Network). Students who can find and follow information across sites and texts have the 21st-century skills that academics, CEO’s, and politicians keep asserting we desperately need. The world in 20 years will be much closer to Gabriela’s than any nostalgic vision of reciting poetry by the fireside.
Lamenting the transformation in the way students think or interact with the (increasingly online) world is not only unproductive, but it does a disservice to an entire generation that is already embracing and shaping the future that others are running away from.
Gabriela won’t have any trouble; another commenter made her a job offer.
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