8: “May I have your attention?”

The Consequences of Anytime, Anywhere Technology

I check my Facebook at least once every hour at work.

—Kayla, twenty-two-year-old college student

Sitting in a neighborhood café one day, I unexpectedly found myself doing some ethnographic work as I witnessed the social- and mobile-media lifestyle up close and personal. Not long after I had powered up my laptop and settled in, a group of seventh and eighth graders started filing into the quiet little shop. A nearby middle school had just let out for the day, and the vibe of the place changed instantly. Both the middle school girls and boys had that just-got-out-of-jail look in their eyes and were boisterous, joking, and generally upbeat. Some of them were hanging out waiting for a parent to pick them up. Others were digging through their pockets and backpacks for money to purchase an after-school snack. As a group of them settled in their seats, they all pulled out cell phones and began checking and sending text messages. A few pictures were snapped with the phones. There were also some quick tutorials about this or that application, the kind of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing that makes the young and the digital such formidable players in the new media landscape. I even noticed an iPhone among the bunch, which prompted me to quietly slide my modest mobile device beyond their view.

What I was seeing, of course—young people socializing with each other face-to-face and through their mobile phones—is standard fare today. Around the world, the phone is a centerpiece technology in young people’s lives. In a 2008 study of 2,089 mobile-phone users in the United States, ages thirteen to nineteen, Harris Interactive found that 45 percent agree with the statement “Having a cell phone is the key to my social life.” In most families today the question is not if school-age kids will get their own mobile phone but rather when. By most accounts kids are asking for and getting mobile phones at earlier and earlier ages. For them, getting a phone is a life-changing moment that signifies a greater degree of maturity, personal mobility, and independence. By 2007 a decisive majority of American teens, 77 percent owned a mobile phone. Studies show that about 40 percent of tweens, kids ages eight to twelve, own phones.

Anytime, anywhere technologies have trickled down to the youngest members in our culture. Young children can operate DVRs, smartphones, and laptops with great ease and efficiency. Among my friends and peers it is not uncommon for children as young as six to own an iPod. The music purchased by tweens and teens is commonly among the top downloaded at the iTunes Store. In fact, young people have turned the iTunes Store into a virtual mall. In addition to shopping at the Apple site, they excitedly share their views about the pop music and icons marketed to them by corporate music labels.

An unintended consequence of young kids’ adoption of digital media is that fast entertainment and continuous partial attention (CPA) are invading our nation’s schools.

Today, teachers and school administrators are on the frontlines of the digital migration. Every day at work they face a generation who own more personal and mobile media than any cohort of kids the world has ever known. In order to learn more about the impact in the classroom, I visited schools and spoke with several principals and teachers.

When I initially began these conversations, I was surprised to find that a growing number of schools permit students to bring their personal media to campus. Not that long ago, the idea of allowing students to bring transistor radios or Walkmans into the school was unthinkable. But the current decision to allow kids to walk into schools equipped with a personal army of media reveals how our values, behaviors, and culture are evolving in the digital age. Two factors, ultimately, led to a more open policy regarding the presence of mobile phones in America’s classrooms.

First, the open policies acknowledge what Everett M. Rogers calls the “diffusion of innovations.” Back in the 1960s, Rogers developed his now widely cited theory to help explain how technological innovations spread throughout society. Innovations are initially used by what Rogers refers to as “early adopters” before gaining widespread and in some cases near-universal embrace across a population. Compared to countries in parts of Asia and Europe, the United States was a laggard when it came to adopting the mobile phone. But a combination of factors, including sharp pricing decreases, competitive family phone plans, and disparate family schedules, have greatly increased mobile-phone use in America. Another factor is the anxiety caused by tragedies like high-profile school shootings and the attacks on September 11, 2001. Just how much has mobile-phone use in the United States evolved?

In a 2002 poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 38 percent said it would be hard to give up their mobile phone. In that survey more or just as many people found it hard to give up their landline phone (63 percent), television (47 percent), or the Internet (38 percent). Five years later, though, the technological preferences of Americans revealed significant change. Mobile phones (57 percent) ranked ahead of the Internet (45 percent), television (43 percent), and the landline phone (40 percent).

Among young people, the mobile phone is an especially desirable technology. Sixty-two percent of young people told Pew it would be hard to give up their phone. According to Pew, Americans under the age thirty “are much more likely to say it would be hard to be without a mobile phone than to be without the internet or email.” In 2000 the most likely user of a mobile phone in the United States was a white, middle-aged male professional. By 2008 a broad cross-section of Americans—men and women, young and old, students and professionals—used mobile phones. And when it comes to some of the more creative and personalized aspects of mobile-phone use, individuals under thirty are the trendsetters.

In short, school administrators around the country get it—mobile phones are a fact of life. Ms. Waters, the principal of an affluent high school, explained her school’s decision to allow personal media this way. “Rather than fight our students, we have decided that the most effective approach is to help them handle their media at school more responsibly.” She added that “devices like cell phones and iPods are way too small to try and police. They can put these miniature gadgets in their backpacks or pockets and we would never know they had them.” As long as the devices stay out of sight and are used properly, she insists that the school should focus on other matters. At her school, students are allowed to bring mobile phones, laptops, and iPods. They can use them during lunch and in between classes. Teachers in her school can use their own discretion regarding personal media in the classroom. A vast majority of the teachers that I spoke with believe that the decision to allow personal media in the school is a mistake.

One teacher stated flatly, “Once you start allowing kids to bring cell phones and iPods into the school, you are really asking for trouble.”

The second reason schools have decided to permit mobile phones in the school appears to be more out of outside pressure than a genuine embrace of such policies. When principals and teachers initially moved against mobile phones, an unexpected voice of protest rose up against the idea—from parents. Many teachers and principals told me that parents are the strongest advocates for allowing their children to carry mobile phones to school.

“Parents,” one principal told me, “absolutely insist that their children carry phones.”

Mobile phones are central in the management of household life. Family members often have disparate schedules that render them busy and on the go. Mobile phones are an efficient way to communicate with family, coordinate schedules, and update whereabouts. For many parents the use of a phone by their children is no longer a luxury, but it is a source of security.

The nation’s largest school district has managed to resist pressure from parents to buck a national trend that permits mobile phones and personal media in the school. With over 1.1 million students under its watch, the New York City Board of Education moved aggressively to rid its schools of mobile phones, iPods, and other devices officials believe undermine the academic and learning experience. This is part of a larger initiative by the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and School Chancellor, Joel Klein, to improve student school performance by creating what they characterized as a safer and more prolearning environment.

On April 26, 2006, New York City schools began randomly installing metal detectors to search for what it called “school contraband,” or objects that the new disciplinary code prohibited students from bringing to school. But the policy to keep banned objects out quickly turned into a crackdown on mobile phones in the schools. Over the first twelve days of the plan, the New York City Department of Education reported capturing seven knives, two box cutters, a razor, some marijuana, and around eight hundred phones. Many New York students, especially those from middle-class homes, were shocked when they arrived at school only to find that the metal detectors were there to conduct random searches. There were local news reports that some students broke down in tears when they were forced to relinquish their most prized possession, their mobile phone. When the school year resumed in September, the first five weeks of sweeps led to the confiscation of 34 weapons, 784 electronic gadgets like the iPod, and 2,286 phones, according to the city’s department of education.

In an interview with a local NBC news affiliate, Klein explained that the mobile-phone ban was necessary to maintain order and discipline. “They are used for everything,” the chancellor told NBC News. Klein elaborated: “Kids are text messaging in their pockets. Phones can be used for people to be on the Web and, you know, we don’t have time during the school day to spend our time chasing around the cell phones. We need to educate our kids.”

NYC school officials complain that mobile phones also contribute to the making of poor citizenship and an unhealthy school environment. Some students use their phones to bully, isolate, and intimidate their peers. And with the added bonus of camera phones, school officials note that students use their phones to take and circulate inappropriate pictures of people in the locker room. A few teachers even complained that students were snapping pictures of exams and then passing them on to friends.

Bans on mobile phones in schools date back to the mid-to-late 1980s when fears that students were using beepers, pagers, and phones to sell illegal drugs ran rampant. By the start of the new millennium the public image of the typical teen mobile-phone user had changed dramatically as tweens and teens from middle-class and affluent households turned the phone into a mobile-media platform (i.e., music downloads), a source of personal expression (i.e., customized ring tones), a content creator (i.e., pictures), and a whole new language (i.e., text messaging).

Mobile phones are a way of life for Generation Text. A 2008 study found that mobile phones ranked second only to clothes when it came to determining the social status of teens. In an appearance in front of state lawmakers considering a ban on mobile phones, one young teen defended cell phones this way: “To you this is a tool. To me this is jewelry.” For her generation, mobile phones are as necessary as the clothes you wear to school. Reacting to her phone being confiscated, one fifteen-year-old girl cried, “I feel naked. I feel like I lost something very important to me.”

The zero-tolerance policy provoked an intense showdown with the parents of New York City school children who called the ban out of touch with the way families are managed today. New York’s open school policy means that many students take the subway to get to far-away schools and back home. In their e-mail messages to the school board, parents characterized the policy as “cruel and heartless,” “absurdly wrong-headed,” “antiparent,” “ridiculous,” and a “terrible infringement.” Parents held public protest rallies where they carried signs that read “Bloomberg and Klein to NYC Schoolchildren: Don’t Phone Home!” or “Mobile Phones=Security.” One parent said point blank, “The chancellor will have civil disobedience on his hands. No one in New York is going to let their child go to school without a cell phone.”

Even as parents push to keep phones in the hands of their children, teachers are genuinely troubled by the arrival of personal media in classrooms already struggling to keep students interested in school and learning. Talk to just about any high school teacher in schools that allow mobile phones, and their views are likely to resemble the ones that I hear repeatedly: personal media are transforming our nation’s classrooms and not necessarily for the better.

Teachers are quite outspoken when it comes to personal media in the classroom. Among those I met, none was more outspoken than Mr. Carter, a social studies and tenth-grade pre-advanced-placement instructor in a school whose students come predominantly from working-class households.

I met with Mr. Carter on three different occasions. He was young, passionate, and in tune with his students. He cared about them and treated some as if they were his personal responsibility. Some of his students did not hesitate to text message him about an assignment, but when it came to mobile phones in the classroom, he drew a sharp line.

Walk into Mr. Carter’s classroom and one of the first things you’ll see is a sign that has a picture of a mobile phone with a red circle around it and a slash through it that reads, TURN IT OFF! “We [teachers] hate cell phones and iPods at the school,” he told me, adding, “They are a tremendous distraction among our students. They text in class and often to one another within the school.” According to Mr. Carter, his students are especially skilled at text messaging. He claims that they can send small messages via their phone without even looking at the keypad. Shaking his head in pure amazement, Mr. Carter explained, “They have gotten so sneaky and adept at texting that they can do it with the phones in their pockets.” Forty-two percent of the teens in the online panel conducted by Harris Interactive said they could text blindfolded.

In addition to texting each other, teens use mobile phones to manage a wide assortment of content—ring tones, pictures, games, and videos. Phones are especially popular for accessing fast entertainment. In one conversation with tenth graders, many of them talked about using their phones while in class. Fifteen-year-old Manuel said, “Sometimes I use MySpace on my phone just to check and see what is going on.” Monique, also fifteen, said, “It’s hard not to at least check your phone while you are sitting in class.”

The policy at Mr. Carter’s school states that the use of phones in class is strictly prohibited. There is policy and then there is reality. Many students simply ignore the policy and willingly risk their phones being picked up by a teacher. Phones confiscated in this particular school district have to be retrieved by parents who are also required to pay a $15 fine. Not even the threat of a triple penalty that involves the confiscation of the phone, parents, and a fine is an effective enough deterrent to phone use in the classroom. In the first week of the 2008–09 academic year, fines for telephones exceeded $3,000 at the school.

“This may surprise you, but some parents actually call their children while they are in class,” Mr. Carter said. Such behavior, he explained, makes the enforcement of the no-phone policy even more difficult. “I had a case once,” Mr. Carter said, “where I got a message from the office stating that a student in my class was going home because she was sick.” Mr. Carter had no idea what was happening until the student left his class and went home with her mother.

“She texted her mother and said that she was ill,” Mr. Carter explained.

When the student returned to class the next day, the teacher reiterated the no-phone policy.

The ninth-grade student responded, “I’m pregnant.”

“I don’t care! You don’t use your phone in class,” Mr. Carter replied.

I knew that he cared about the young woman’s welfare. Privately, he even expressed concern for her. “She’s a very bright young woman, but now I’m not sure what this means for her future.”

Mr. Carter also cared about his students respecting the rules regarding technology and the integrity of the schoolroom-learning environment he so desperately wanted to protect. Mobile phones in the classroom push him to the brink. So does the iPod. “They carry them around like gold,” said Mr. Carter, referring to the wildly popular digital music player.

“They sit in class, and if you don’t watch them, they slide the ear buds into their ears and listen to music while you are teaching or while they are supposed to be working,” Mr. Carter explained to me one day. “They claim that listening to music helps them work better, which I don’t always doubt, but it is another non-class-related matter that we have to deal with.” Mr. Carter is not antitechnology. He exchanges MySpace and text messages with his students; some of the teachers in his school incorporate podcasts from the iPod in their instruction. Still, he believes that personal media has changed the dynamics of the classroom.

“All of this,” he said, referring to repeated instances of having to deal with media in class, “is often done at the expense of stopping class and interrupting teaching and learning.” Like a lot of teachers, he is frustrated by the degree to which personal media use in the classroom disrupts learning for everyone in the classroom, not just the student using media. Mr. Carter’s concerns have merit.

In a 2007 study with Microsoft employees, researchers Shamsi T. Iqbal and Eric Horvitz conducted a field study to investigate the disruption and recovery of work-related tasks. Here is one of the hypotheses that they tested: employees using their computers for work will have difficulty resuming work-related tasks once they are interrupted by an e-mail or messenger service alert. To test their hypotheses, Iqbal and Horvitz studied the computers of twenty-seven employees who held a number of job descriptions, including, for example, program manager, researcher, and software developer. The researchers were able to watch the users’ interaction with software applications and their associated windows in addition to a log of incoming e-mail and instant-messaging alerts. Over a two-week period, Iqbal and Horvitz collected 2,267 hours of activity data. What did all that data show?

Well, on an hourly basis a primary task—or what Iqbal and Horvitz define as the “normal daily tasks that users perform as their primary responsibility while in the computing environment”—was interrupted by an average of four e-mail alerts and three IM alerts. Many of the study participants responded within seconds to either e-mail or IM alerts, causing an interruption in the execution of their primary task. Some of the users indicated that they felt an obligation to respond to IM because someone else was on the other end. And given that e-mails are part of the workday flow, users also felt a need to respond to those alerts. According to Iqbal and Horvitz, users spent about ten minutes on the e-mail or IM switches caused by the incoming messages. But users did not stop there. Many of them tended to browse through other peripheral applications, thus further delaying the resumption of their primary task. In total, switching from a primary task to an e-mail or IM alert led to a loss of about twenty to twenty-five minutes. A main conclusion of the study is summed up this way: “Even when users respond immediately with the intention of resuming the suspended current task as soon as possible, they often end up taking significantly more time to return than the time to respond.”

A number of employees repeatedly losing as many as twenty minutes of time in the workplace can be costly. In the classroom, where time and resources are already limited, the regular loss of even a few minutes can be disastrous. What seems like a negligible interruption from a student’s perspective, sending and receiving small messages in class can end up costing valuable class time and the focus needed to learn a concept or complete an assignment.

There are two kinds of technologies in today’s classroom: technologies that pull students away from the classroom, and technologies that pull students into the classroom. Whereas the former potentially undermine the learning experience, the latter may in turn enrich academic efforts. So far I have only discussed the former. To suggest that technology in the classroom is only a distraction would be both unfair and untrue. Across the United States there are educators who are experimenting in wonderful ways with technology to enliven the learning experience, using everything from blogs and podcasts to games and interactive maps. During a visit to an affluent seventh- through twelfth-grade school, I met Ms. Johnson, a librarian/technology coordinator who maintains constant contact with her students via blogs, her library Web site, e-mail, and IM.

When I visited her school’s library Web site, I was genuinely impressed with the “integrated assignments” she helps teachers build online. On one assignment about capital punishment, the librarian used pictures of a lethal-injection facility, links to Supreme Court documents, online databases, and source aids to bring the issue and the assignment to life. Another assignment, titled “The Islam Project,” used a wiki that encouraged each group to cultivate and share ideas about their projects.

“How receptive are the students to the ways you incorporate technology into their assignments?” I asked.

“The kids are amazing,” she answered. “Technology is a matter of course with them. It is the way they do business.”

Earlier that year she asked the ninth graders to compare a technology-based biology assignment with a more traditional assignment that included lectures, reading, and an exam. Most students chose the interactive assignment. “Ninety-five percent of the freshman class overwhelmingly and insightfully preferred it,” she told me, adding that the students indicated that “they would remember the material better, as they learned it collaboratively and through a variety of sources, instead of their teacher delivering it in a lecture that they would soon forget.”

Ms. Paul, another high school principal I met, is also buoyant about technology.

“When it comes to technology,” she said, “the kids teach us.”

The veteran administrator had recently concluded that many of her students were so skilled at making digital media content that her school had to upgrade the courses and instruction the curricula offers in media production. She also believes that technology, especially the Internet and SMART Boards, are turning the classroom into a spirited learning space. And it is not simply the technology but rather how the students and teachers are using the tools that excites Ms. Paul. “Technology in the classroom,” she told me, “has reinvigorated some of my most established teachers, creating what can be called a strategic partnership between teachers and students.”

Technology, Ms. Paul reminded me, is not only beneficial to students; it has payoffs for the teachers too. One thirty-year veteran teacher of government told her, “I am not retiring for several more years.” For this particular teacher, discovering technology’s impact in the classroom—through video, interactive maps, virtual tours and museums—was like discovering the fountain of youth. “In her class,” Ms. Paul explained, “students were learning about government and campaigns in ways that were engaging, lively, relevant, and much more powerful.”

During a visit to a third-grade math class, I witnessed up close how anytime, anywhere technologies can enhance the learning experiences of young children in some rather extraordinary ways.

The teacher instructed the students to gather around on the floor in front of a large SMART Board, an interactive blackboard that you can write on as well as project Web-based images and video. After working through several math problem-solving strategies, the teacher then asked the students to return to their desks, where they were given a set of instructions and problems to begin solving. Before they began working, the teacher projected a YouTube video on the SMART Board. The video was a tutorial that reiterated some of the math strategies they just covered. It was a unique way to reinforce the teacher’s lesson, almost virtual and something akin to a smart game. I noticed how the SMART Board and the YouTube video kept the kids engaged and immersed in the instructional moment. In this affluent school, many of the students are accustomed to SMART Technologies’ interfaces. Shortly after students began working on a few problems, class time expired and they were instructed to line up in preparation to move on to the next class. Standing in line, a third-grade girl raised her hand.

“Ms. Harris, can we watch the YouTube video you showed us at home?”

“Sure,” Ms. Harris answered back. “I will send the link to your parents and they can help you pull up the video you just saw.”

Ms. Harris and I looked at each other and smiled. Rather than wait until the next class day to resume working on the math problems, the eight-year-old student was savvy enough to understand that the Internet gave her another option: she could replicate part of the classroom experience at home. Sure, anytime, anywhere technologies can bring fast entertainment into the classroom in ways that are academically disruptive. But those same technologies can also bring the classroom into the home in ways that are academically productive. The key of course is figuring out ways to make the latter scenario the rule if, as of now, it is the exception in far too many instances.

The call to bring new digital media technologies—laptops, the Internet, and social Web applications—into the classroom is growing more robust. This particular movement is part of a more enduring call to modernize the nation’s educational system. Driving the rationale for more experimentation in the classroom is a relatively straightforward notion: the belief that new digital media technologies can make the classroom a more relevant and stimulating place to be. In some circles the call for renovating the curricula in America’s schools even includes games, a technology long regarded as a foe to learning by many educators and social scientists. Proponents of games, like literacy scholar James Paul Gee, maintain that the emphasis on interactivity, nonlinear learning, and problem solving offers good learning principles. What new digital-media technologies ultimately establish in the classroom, advocates urge, is active (doing) rather than passive (telling) learning.

Middle and high schools are not the only formal learning environments facing the unintended consequences of mobile technologies, fast entertainment, and the rampant rise of continuous partial attention (CPA). On a more personal note, I regularly witness how media multitasking in class and constantly divided attention spans are also changing the learning environment in our nation’s colleges and universities. If high school teachers dread the presence of mobile phones and iPods in the classroom, a steady rising number of college professors dread the presence of laptops and classrooms offering wi-fi connections.

Before I began writing this book, one of my colleagues decided to ban laptops from his classroom. I thought the decision was heavy handed, out of touch, and unnecessary. Around the country, many college faculties are banning laptops. Now, I am learning the importance of establishing some clear rules regarding the use of laptops in the classroom. The anytime, anywhere capabilities of laptops are real and the pull of fast entertainment is relentless. CPA is just as much a part of today’s classroom as teachers and students are.

One day I decided to conduct a small informal ethnographic exercise. I sat in on a large freshman introductory class of about 250 students. Sitting in the back of the large auditorium, I pulled out a notebook and began taking notes. Nobody noticed me, but it did not take long before I noticed some interesting behaviors. At least a third of the class had laptops, and toward the back of the auditorium it was clear that class time was the right time for anytime, anywhere media. Several students pulled up Facebook, and I even noticed a couple of students browsing through YouTube. Some students were using their laptops to follow class, but many others were not. Many of the students with laptops were absent in their presence.

Similar behavior happens in small classrooms too. While lecturing to my class of about thirty students one day, I noticed a student smiling as she typed on her laptop. Her delighted gaze never strayed from her computer screen, and clearly she was not smiling about my lecture on the digital divide—the gap between the technology rich and technology poor. In other words, she was in class physically but not mentally or intellectually. When I met with a small group of graduate teaching assistants, they explained that in classes held in large-size auditoriums, it is not uncommon for at least a third of the class to be using laptops. It is impossible to know what students are doing on their computers in large- and smaller-size classes.

Continuous partial attention in the classroom not only raises questions about what, if anything, students are learning when they divide their attention between class and fast entertainment. It also raises questions about the overall learning environment in the college classroom today. Back in the day, students’ attention certainly wandered in the classroom; they daydreamed, doodled in their notebooks, read a magazine, or simply fell asleep. And there were certainly distractions in the lecture hall before laptops and the Web, including newspapers, magazines, crossword puzzles, and portable music players, just to name a few. There is growing suspicion, however, that mobile technologies enhances the degree of intensity with which students’ attention wanders today. Imagine a classroom in which one-third of the students pull out newspapers to read. In many ways, checking e-mail, browsing Web sites, or checking for status updates on Facebook while in a classroom is the digital-world equivalent of that scene. Apparently, the lack of focus has been particularly acute in many law school classrooms.

Citing their disruptive nature, a number of law professors have banned the use of laptops in their classes. A growing number of legal scholars are finding it difficult to practice the Socratic method, a widely used teaching technique in legal education, in classrooms offering wi-fi. The Socratic method works best when students are engaged, poised, and ready to discuss legal cases, theories, and history with focused intensity. In a Washington Post op-ed piece, David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, writes that the response he hears most often from his students when practicing the Socratic method is, “Can you repeat the question, please?” Cole adds, “It is usually asked while the student glances up from the laptop screen that otherwise occupies his or her field of vision.”

When June Entman banned laptops in her classes at the University of Memphis Law School, students staged a miniprotest by passing around a petition to regain the right to use their laptops. In an e-mail to her students, Entman explained the ban this way. “The wall of vertical screens keeps me from seeing many of your faces, even those of some students who are only neighbors of a laptop.” Entman maintains that laptop screens hamper the flow of discussion and thus diminish the quality of the learning experience.

Another personal encounter I had in the classroom is also instructive. After noticing how a graduate student’s use of his laptop was causing him to drift in and out of the seminar, I sent an e-mail to the class reminding them that if they use a computer during class it should be related to their involvement in the class. My e-mail sparked an interesting discussion the next time the class met. A couple of students in this small seminar politely made the case that using a laptop or some other device in class to check e-mail or attend to some other non-class-related task did not weaken the quality of the learning environment or their performance in the class. The student whose behavior provoked my initial e-mail even went so far as to say that it was impossible to sit through a near three-hour class (we do take breaks) without his laptop and presumably the ability to browse the Web. The conversation was a revelation.

Asking young people to disconnect even momentarily from the vast swirl of content and comrades they engage throughout the day generates anxiety, discomfort, and cultural alienation. Today, when you ask students to turn off their computers, mobile phones, and iPods, you are asking them to turn off their lives. The pushback from the Memphis law students or the two graduate students in my class is in many ways a bid to stay alive. Nothing more, nothing less.

After pondering about the exchange with the students, I asked myself, Is it even reasonable to expect students to commit their full attention in a classroom setting? Have we created a culture in which the ability to pay attention to a single thing for a sustained period of time is simply no longer possible in a age of constant stimulation, communication, and gratification? Anyone managing a classroom today can no longer ignore the reality of continuous partial attention and the pervasiveness of personal media. Some observers believe that the hyperkinetic, always-on environment in which we live makes it next to impossible to maintain focus for extended periods of time. Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in attention deficit disorder (ADD), subscribes to this view.

Hallowell, a former Harvard Medical School professor, describes this condition as attention deficit trait (ADT). He asserts that while humans are born with ADD, ADT is environmental. Discussing ADT, Hallowell says, “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.” No matter if it’s adults in the corporate world or students in the classroom, ADT, Hallowell contends, leads to brain labor overload and a dilution of our mental powers and performance capabilities.

To be fair, the cultural changes partially wrought by technological changes demand that instructors rethink their approach to pedagogy and learning. Technology thought leader Don Tapscott likens the traditional model of teaching—the lecture—to the broadcast. A broadcast, he reminds us, “is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion.” Both television and the lecture, Tapscott argues, are losing their audience. “Sitting in front of a TV set—or a teacher—doesn’t appeal to this generation,” he writes. “But unlike the entertainment world, the educational establishment doesn’t offer enough alternatives to the one-way broadcast.”

Maybe students are surfing the Web in class because they are not being sufficiently engaged in class. Or, maybe they are surfing the Web in class because CPA makes it increasingly difficult to sustain their focus. Either way, the culture is evolving and so are learners. How instructors approach students and learning must evolve too. Technology in the end is never the problem or the solution. Humans are.

If you think the concerns about multitasking, fast entertainment, and CPA are simply a generational gap between the so-called digital natives and the digital immigrants, think again. Talk to young people as we did and you’ll discover that many of them are also grappling with the consequences of anytime, anywhere technology.

On practically every scale that we used to examine young people’s attitudes about social and mobile media, the outcome is unequivocally favorable. They use, trust, and derive immense satisfaction from their laptops, mobile phones, and the Web. More than half of those we surveyed, 56 percent, believe the Web is a necessity in life. And it is true. Every facet of their lives—school, work, play, finances, shopping, and communication with their close friends—is managed through the Web.

And yet, when we ask young twenty-somethings if there are any regrettable aspects related to their engagement with social and mobile media, they consistently point to one factor: the difficulty in turning it off when they need to focus on school or work. Despite college students’ fascination, for instance, with Facebook, they routinely described the platform as “a major time-suck.” Melanie, a twenty-one-year-old public relations major, said that Facebook distracts her from her homework. Twenty-year-old Scott believes that he would do more worthwhile things if he did not spend so much time on the popular platform. Josh spends a lot of his day chatting with friends online and checking their Facebook status.

“I spend way too much time [online],” Josh said, “and I believe they [social-network sites] are addicting because you can get on Facebook and not realize how much time has passed. You look up and it can be hours later.”

Echoing this concern about the Web, twenty-two-year old Byron told us, “You can go on there and lose three hours of your time when you should be studying instead of viewing other people’s profiles.” The ability to see what their friends are doing, along with whom they are doing it with, is not only a powerful pull, it is a constant pull. It is not that social and mobile media are necessarily addictive but rather that they are omnipresent.

For many students the ability to maintain their focus and attention on an academic task is especially challenging when the tool they are likely using to execute the task—a computer—is their screen of choice for information, entertainment, and life sharing with their friends. In fact, many of the college students we spoke with readily acknowledge that the Internet is a major source of distraction while trying to study. This is not a recent trend. In a 1997 survey of 531 college students, psychology professor Kathy Scherer reports that 13 percent of her respondents acknowledged that excessive use of the Internet interfered in their social life and/or academic performance. While it is not recent, the impact of the Web on academic performance is evolving and in some ways intensifying. The constant connectivity afforded by today’s technology has become a highly desirable feature of our digital environment. In our survey, more than four in ten, or 44 percent, agreed with the statement “I cannot stay away from the Internet for too long.” What they really can’t seem to stay away from are the opportunities to communicate with their friends or check their profiles for updates. I gained a newfound appreciation for this small factoid after reading a student’s paper one day.

This particular student was writing about her peer’s use of social-network sites. As I read the paper, I noticed several unexplained asterisks. Unsure what the marks meant, I continued on. Finally, at the end of her ten-page report, the student explained the asterisks: they signaled each time she logged on to Facebook while writing her paper. She stopped six times in the middle of the paper to check Facebook. Interestingly, the class was examining the social consequences of the social Web, and that prompted her to write this about her favorite online site: “I think that it is a very good way to show not only how entertaining it can be, but how distracting it can be!”

Jennifer, a twenty-six-year-old sociology major, is like most young people that we met. The Web is a part of her day, “pretty much throughout the day.” She prefers MySpace. “I usually use it as a break from studying. Check my e-mail or check the news,” she said. Usually when she pulls up MySpace for a quick study break she finds herself staying online much longer than she intended. “I can’t help myself,” she explained. Scanning the profiles of friends and acquaintances for simple amusement has become so habitual that many students find themselves constantly battling the urge to do so even when they are sitting in class or trying to complete school-related tasks. When Jennifer absolutely needs to get some schoolwork done, she physically separates herself from the computer. “I sometimes try to leave my computer home on purpose and go to coffee shops so I won’t use it because it’s such a draw,” she said. As extreme as this may sound, it is not out of the ordinary.

We heard an assortment of ways young people fight back the constant pull of online videos, games, Facebook, and all of the other bite-size digital goodies when they need to study. One of the most urgent matters in today’s always-on lifestyle is not addiction but rather the division of our attention.

Twenty-one-year-old Jake, a history major, also finds it difficult to maintain his focus on schoolwork when he is near his computer. “I find myself having to physically remove myself from the computer in order to read or write a paper,” he admitted.

Jake continued: “Like, my computer stays in my living room so my roommate and I can use it, and I’ll have to go into my room and close the door to do reading. Like, physically get up away from the computer and, like, sit on the couch so I’m not next to the computer.” Otherwise, he claimed, “I’ll just pass time on the computer.”

Not that long ago, television used to be our chief source for passing time. Not anymore. Whereas 27 percent of those we surveyed said they use television “most often” to pass time, twice as many, 54 percent, said they use the Internet to pass time. A Pew study reports that 82 percent of persons ages eighteen to twenty-nine have gone online just to pass time. When asked if they did it yesterday, 37 percent said yes.

Elizabeth also uses creative methods to resist her computer and the allure of fast entertainment. The twenty-two-year-old government and fine arts major said, “It takes a lot of willpower for me to not check it [Facebook] a lot when I’m doing my homework because homework is a lot more boring. . . . It’s the truth.”

We have every reason to believe that young people like these are increasingly the norm rather than the exception. It is clear that they are looking for a place of refuge from the deluge of content accessible through their computers. They are also looking for a place to simply stop, disconnect, and think. Hallowell maintains that “if you don’t allow yourself to stop and think, you’re not getting the best of your brain. What your brain is best equipped to do is to think, to analyze, to dissect and create. And if you’re simply responding to bits of stimulation, you won’t ever go deep.” Many students, I believe, would agree.

While we were out in the field talking with young people, Facebook launched its news-feed feature that automatically alerts users of any and all changes made by someone in their network. While some Facebook users complained that the feature was too invasive, many others eagerly embraced it. Elizabeth absolutely loves the news feed. She admitted, “And even if nothing’s changed, I think it’s almost even just the habit of thinking that something exciting might be happening on the Internet. That’s more exciting than the paper that I’m writing.”

Several of the young people that we talked to acknowledged that they are constantly logging on to see if anyone has posted comments on their wall, uploaded new pictures, or changed their status update. This constant state of alert, the sense that in an always-on world you are missing something, is, of course, one of the key symptoms of continuous partial attention.

More than half of the young people we surveyed said that they check Facebook three or more times a day. In our in-depth conversations it is clear that many students check several times throughout the day. Kayla, a twenty-two-year-old economics major, could not count. Her response to the question neatly summed up what we often heard: “I check my Facebook at least once every hour at work,” she said. “Something is always happening on Facebook.”

As important as the debate about addiction, multitasking, and CPA is, something subtle yet equally profound is occurring alongside the widespread diffusion of social and mobile media. Anytime, anywhere technologies do more than deliver fast entertainment and steal away our attention. These technologies do more than transform how we consume content. Social- and mobile-media platforms also transform our world by transforming how we experience space. In an environment where fast entertainment is always accessible, the boundaries between traditional leisure spaces (think home or the cinema) and nonleisure places (think work or school) are erased. In today’s technology-rich world, any place can be a leisure space—a place to download a video, watch a movie clip, listen to your favorite pop single, or take a quick peek at a friend’s personal profile. Addiction is not the more common challenge in the digital world; the ubiquitous presence of entertainment and the desire for constant gratification are.

In the current cultural milieu, fast entertainment is more than a luxury or a way to pass time. It is an entitlement that more and more of us expect no matter where we are—at home, at work, in school, on vacation, or even when driving our cars. That cultural ethos, or the expectation that anytime is the right time for entertainment, is transforming our behavior and our world.