Multi-friending? Social Multi-tasking?

Just to round out a week in which multitasking unexpectedly emerged as a recurrent issue, a further thought inspired by a piece in the New York Review of Books. Charles Petersen discusses two recent books on Facebook and MySpace. Both recount the histories of the social networking sites and the review focuses on the class-based origins of Facebook at Harvard and the more working-class ethos of MySpace. It's an appropriate approach to social networking and one that Petersen develops with insight. More implicitly, the review underscores the importance of capturing and analyzing the history of digital communities and social interaction, which for many seem utterly ephemeral. It's sobering to realize that the establishment of both MySpace and Facebook (or at least Mark Zuckerberg's initial attempt, Facemash) occurred only in 2003.

Where Petersen ends, though, and ultimately why the review relates to multitasking, is with a question about the nature of "friends" that are made and maintained on these networks. We may have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of "friends," but what is the level of intimacy or sustained interaction we share with them? While the news has recently focused on Facebook's privacy policy, the better question may be how communication on the site allows friends to share or to hide aspects of themselves. "We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud," William Deresiewicz is quoted as observing. "Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling." Is the parallel here to the quandary in digital learning of seeking abundance and novelty or avoiding depth and hard work? If so, the consequences of these technologies for society and interpersonal relations go far beyond class and warrant greater consideration from all of us.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23651

More multitasking...in the Digital Nation

Last night, PBS's Frontline broadcast a 90-minute program called "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier." The website has actually been up and active for months and was Frontline's first multiplatform project. You can watch the entire program online. Frankly, though, it is the website, with its multiple links, fuller-length interviews, stories submitted by the public on YouTube, expert roundtable, and self-guided online workshops, that offers a more impressive introduction to a host of social, cultural and psychological issues related to the proliferation of digital technologies. Much of the attention in the program itself is dedicated to younger generations of users, the digital natives, and how they learn (or don't) as constant users of multiple technologies. With the technologies being so new and the generation being so young, conclusions are hardly clear, but the consensus in the program and research beyond is that multitasking does not generally enable deep learning. (One irony pointed out here is that those who believe themselves most adept at multitasking, even among the natives, are in fact the weakest.)

Focusing on digital natives and their typical exclusion of analog media is a worthy and timely topic. Yet one does get the sense that many of the experts' fascination with the younger generation's distinctiveness stems in part, and not unimportantly, from their own parental curiosity about their children (on the "Digital Nation" homepage is thus a link to a "What is you Digital Parenting Style?" quiz). Whatever the ultimate motivation, by extending that fixation on the digital native, the program and website avoid what is a more complicated and also more widespread set of issues. How is learning or information gathering and processing across generations affected not by a categorical shift to digital technology use but by a mixing of digital and non-digital media? Perhaps this is a question that will be obsolete in only a few decades, but in the meantime, it seems much more pressing for making sense of how anyone over the age of 30 or so relates to diverse media and other people. That is also obviously a relevant question for media companies -- and neglecting it may betray yet again most media industries' characteristic over-emphasis on the tastes and habits of youth demographics.

The Frontline site is a great resource: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

Media multitasking: Seeking abundance or avoiding depth?

Not unrelated to my experience of returning to reading newspapers in print, and inevitably comparing them to digital news sources, is some recent research on student learning in the classroom. Summarized nicely in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, one of the key questions boils down to this: Is media multitasking driven by a desire for new information or a wish to avoid hard thinking? While there's predictably no clearcut answer, the implications of that research on attention and distraction, analytical thinking and memory, seem relevant to a range of other settings and information. Perhaps including news.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/