Reading Response 5--At War with Multitasking

I really enjoyed watching Digital Nation, and I am happy to say that because I had to watch it online but wanted to watch it on my TV, I wasn't doing anything else while I watched it. As I write this response, I am not listening to music (although that's mostly because it's 6:30 in the morning...), and I do not have my email up in another browser. I am single-tasking, which I think is a vocabulary word that needs to be introduced into our society; I think it can be good to multi-task (clearly lots of scholars agree), but if this is the skill that comes innately, then we need to concentrate on learning how to single-task as well. Obviously there are many issues to engage with in this film (many of the things they talk about hit very close to home for me: my first two years of high school I practically lived online; my dad used to fly those predator drones, and was actually one of the engineers who helped figure out how to equip them with missiles (a fact that simultaneously makes me proud and sad)), but in the spirit of single-tasking (and in not writing an 800 word response...), I'm just sticking to this one.

I graduated in 2007, and applied to this program in 2009. At that time, I was anxious about the application because I really felt like I had become stupid in those intervening two years; even though I was teaching a class at BYU in that time, I didn't challenge myself with rigorous reading, I didn't have intellectual conversations at the level that I did as an undergrad. I stopped requiring myself to sit down and read a text, and I definitely never wrote an essay for fun. I started engaging with media WAY more than I did as an undergrad (when I did the media log assignment in a class as an undergraduate, I often talked about films, short stories, or plays that I encountered in other classes because I didn't have TIME to seek out other media forms), but I wasn't engaging with it on the same level. I went for quantity interactions, not quality (although Michel Gondry argues that quantity is better than quality because quality doesn't last...). I became more of a multitasker, and even though it meant that I was doing more, I actually do think it made me less capable of focusing on tasks for an extended period of time.

I think we need to stop asking the question of whether or not we need to be able to multitask; clearly there are times in our lives when this is required of us. I think we do need to honestly look at data that tells us that when we multitask we are less effective at each of the activities we are doing, and decide in which situations we can live with this reality. When I'm checking my email and watching American Idol while making dinner, I don't think that my being slightly distracted has too great of an impact (as long as I don't burn what I'm cooking). The degraded quality of my work in this scenario doesn't have super high stakes. However, when I'm checking my email while trying to understand Stan Brakhage, I have a bit of a problem. We need to help students understand that there are times to multitask and times to single-task, and I think that if we approach them in a way that 1)brings the fact of their multitasking out in the open (instead of ignoring it like I am occasionally inclined to do) and 2)values multitasking as a process, that we could maybe make some sort of headway.