Bread and Circuses

The conflict between privacy and celebrity has finally reached the point of pure idiocy. Actually, it already had, but the recent flap concerning Tiger Woods (who has actually earned his fame) points to the absurdity with which modern media attend to matters that would once have been purely private.

I don't know why Woods slammed into a tree in the middle of the night. And unless it somehow affects national security (as the also-recent flap concerning party crashers at the White House might), I'm content to keep my nose where it belongs. In my own business.

But prurient interest in what goes on in other people's houses seems to have become an international pastime. Witness the tragicomic antics of the "new" royal family in Britain, where the intensity of this kind of curiosity seems to have ramped up, and of which I was reminded last night as we watched Helen Mirren's performance as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears's film The Queen. Never having met QEII herself, I can only judge the acting job superficially, but I was completely taken in by the compelling portrayal of a woman caught between the worlds of restrained tradition and media frenzy.

Queen Elizabeth's initial reaction to Princess Diana's death seems to have been that even though Diana was a public figure, her funeral should be private (there were, after all, children involved here). But nobody in the public eye--especially anyone who has played the public for sympathy (whether deserved or not)--gets privacy any more. The outpouring of grief over Diana's death fueled tabloid hysteria almost to the point of conflagration, as if the papers and television realized that they were losing a cash cow and had to wring out every byline and lurid headline before the furor itself died out.

Nowadays, celebrity is being sought for its own sake. Andy Warhole's fifteen minutes of fame idea has become a life-goal for some people. Substance and accomplishment are no longer criteria of fame. Instead, publicity seems to be the sole measure: whoever can garner the most coverage becomes the news item du jour.

All this is one more indication of the shallowing (probably not a word) of the cultural pool of metaphor. No longer deepening through shared experience, interesting connections, or intellectual freshness, the pool of which I frequently speak is just plain drying up. Metaphors are becoming predictable and stale (like the fifteen minutes of fame quip itself), and even the word "like" (which used to signal an upcoming comparison) has become a vocal mannerism equivalent to "uh" or "you know."

The only still-rich sources of metaphor seem to be science and technology, but even these are turning out tropes based on the rampant growth of social media. So "tweet" and "twitter" no longer refer to sounds made by birds, but rather to noises made by people seeking fame in cyberspace. Science contributes to new words that refer to increasingly short attention spans: nanosecond and (frequently used inappropriately) quantum leap. A quantum is actually really tiny ("quantum theory deals with the tiniest things we know, the particles that atoms are made of"), rather like the brains of those who seem to be operating the news media these days. Ahem.

I don't really want to belabor my point (because, as you know, I tend to go on and on about things), but I do so miss the days when I didn't really know anything about the lives of those making the news. In fact, all I really care about Tiger Woods is how he plays golf. Although I appreciate the example he has been setting for young people, I'm not going to be using any sports figure as an example when it comes to raising children--unless, of course, that sports figure also turns out to be a Rhodes Scholar or a brilliant scientist or an inspiring teacher as well.

Metaphor is about complexity; the more we know, the more creative the connections we can make. Perhaps now is the time for us to turn off our television sets and bake our own bread. Who knows what would happen if we taught our kids to notice what happens when raisin bread rises, rather than what the latest talentless nincompoop is doing in the latest media circus.

Image credit: Henryk Siemiradzki, A Christian Dirce, nineteenth century. The painting depicts Nero with an executed Christian woman in his circus (Wikimedia Commons). Comparisons of current cultural events and those of imperial Rome are commonplace these days, but not inappropriate. For more on this topic, see Cullen Murphy's recent book, Are We Rome?

The Multitasking Myth

I am not generally fond of using "myth" in the sense of "lie" or "untruth widely accepted as truth." (I much prefer the notion of myth as cultural storytelling and as a means of preserving cultural identity.) But since this particularly negative sense of the word is being applied to a phenomenon I find extremely deleterious to learning, I'm ready to go along on this one.

So here's the big question. Is it possible for people in general (and young people in particular) to engage in two or more activities at the same time and do any of them well enough to accomplish the purposes attached to each?

The answer seems to be, according to a resounding majority of researchers, "no."

My General Studies colleagues and I have been saved from some measure of dispute by the fact that our department has banned the use of extraneous technologies in the classroom: no laptops, no iPods, no mobile phones, no recording devices--at least without documents supporting ADA accommodation.

Students occasionally try to circumvent the policy by texting under the desk, but their demeanor is so obvious that I usually catch them and suggest strongly that they put the damned phone away and pay attention. As you can imagine, I'm very well loved for this. But it does make me wonder about students' priorities when they can't shut the "communication" devices off for an hour and a half.

I recently came across Rebecca Clay's article for the APA's online journal, Monitor on Psychology, "Mini-multitaskers." Her thesis is pointed, and reveals the fallacy inherent in the notion that young folk can work effectively on several assignments or tasks at a time.

Multitasking may seem modern and efficient, but research suggests that it slows children's productivity, changes the way they learn and may even render social relationships more superficial.

She provides evidence from recent studies that multitaskers do not save time, but actually take longer to accomplish individual efforts because they're not really doing them simultaneously; they're switching back and forth, and the switching adds time to the job rather than reducing it. And the more complex the job, the more time is lost.

As for my favorite in-class bit of naughty behavior, Clay notes that

Text messaging during class isn't just a high-tech version of passing notes. Because of its demands on attention, multitasking also may impair young people's ability to learn.

This is because, as research out of UCLA indicates, information is processed differently and less effectively when multitasking than it is when one devotes one's full attention to an activity. This may, in turn, exacerbate the problem already bequeathed us by the current emphasis in elementary and high school on rote learning. Dividing attention seems to make it harder for students to truly understand what is being taught; instead, they're more likely to respond by rote, able only to barf back what they've been told without digesting it. Sorry for the ugly analogy, but it's apt.

So, if we combine the short attention spans instilled in our kids by Sesame Street (90 seconds) and television commercials (30 seconds), with the superficiality of rote learning and a constant barrage of digital media (cell phones, iPods, Twitter, Facebook), why doesn't every student have ADHD?

According to Tamara Waters-Wheeler, a North Dakota school psychologist quoted in the article, attention problems are increasing and even if students aren't diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, they're nonetheless exhibiting symptoms because they've grown up multitasking.

The evidence also suggests that the communities established by text-messaging and social networking may be much more superficial than face-to-face friendship. This is particularly important because as media-mediated friendships increase, the quality of these relationships will change the way we look at community, friendship, and other human interactions. The implications for cultural change are manifold. Clay quotes a developmental psychologist, Patricia Greenfield, who finds this multitasking version of friendship troubling:

We evolved as human beings for face-to-face interaction. As more and more interaction becomes virtual, we could lose qualities like empathy that are probably stimulated by face-to-face interaction.

Clay's is only one of myriad articles and blogs devoted to the emerging problems associated with short attention spans and media addiction. One of the best is from Blogger in Middle Earth, Ken Allen, a New Zealand educator whose post on "Binge Thinking" gets at the meat of the matter, which he describes as "cognitive overload."

In order to deal with this phenomenon, it's probably time to start rethinking how we present material to our students. Even in a fast-paced program like ours (cramming a semester's worth of information and learning into eleven weeks), and even in the face of ever more intense scrutiny by the assessment regime, we've simply got to figure out how to slow things down enough to help students change habits that they've acquired over the last twenty years.

Some of what I've read has inspired me to reduce the amount of information and increase the depth to which we explore it each quarter. This is a tough slog for fact- and information-based courses like art history, but in order to address problems associated with superficial learning (and its potential effect on creativity, which I'll address in a later post), some sort of new approach seems necessary. My students are already hinting at a solution: more workshops. My course-evaluation comments are rife with requests for more hands-on activities to connect theory and practice.

I can assure you, however, that I will address the issues one at a time, and use one medium at a time in order to develop some useful strategies. No multitasking will be employed in pursuit of solutions.

As they say in the funnies, "Stay 'tooned."

Image credit: Printed books will always be my medium of choice, but the updated British Museum Reading Room combines the old and the new so beautifully that I thought I'd encourage readers to check it out. The full resolution photo is available here. It was taken in February, 2006, by Diliff and uploaded in its present form to Wikimedia Commons in November 2008. When I mentioned the British Library last week, and wondered what the new library looked like, I hadn't realized that the old reading room still existed at its original site. Because of its marriage of printed codex and digital technology, this seemed like an appropriate illustration for this post. No short attention spans allowed in this place!

Blogging, the Bauhaus, and Short Attention Spans

Last week I walked into my Friday afternoon section of History of Art and Design II to find a number of students busily engaged in reading--or trying to read--my blog. Specifically, they were trying to fathom my latest post on Owl's Farm, Gardeners and Cobblers and Tailors, Oh My. Of all the posts they could have been reading, that might have been a good one (I do have fashion design and fashion merchandising students in the class), but I heard a sigh as I walked into the room: "But she writes so much!"

I recommended to this sweet person (she really is charming, and tries very hard to keep up with what I dish out) that she read my obituary for Biscuit instead, but by that time we needed to get started on a film about the Bauhaus and on talking about final design projects. But the episode made me wonder about how much shared information and background is required for students and their teachers to be able to communicate ideas within the blogosphere.

One thing I decided before I even began writing on The Farm was that my posts would consist of well-considered essays rather than blurby little snippets of opinion. I would only post if I wanted to articulate some idea, or to express a view on those situations that seemed worth comment; I would think them through carefully and research them if necessary before I opened my mouth, as it were, online. I also vowed never to dumb down my vocabulary or message in order to draw more readers. At the same time I knew that I wanted to offer a tempered viewpoint that might resonate with people who otherwise might not always agree with me. My blog was, then, going to appeal to readers like me, with varied interests and fairly open minds.

Some of my first readers were students who had suffered through more than one class with me, and with whom I had already established frequent e-mail correspondence. Most were upper-classmen and women or those who had already graduated and were out pursuing the careers I hope I helped them prepare for. I also attracted a few Canadians and Australians, with whom I seem to have more in common than Texans, as well as fellow skeptics and even some more religious folk who appreciated my not running roughshod over their beliefs (at least most of the time). Some commented on the blog, some e-mailed me, some discussed the posts with me in person. Conversations ensued, which is what I wanted in the first place.

But the inability of many of my students to stay with a long (or long-winded) essay is somewhat disappointing. It's also evidence of an increase of shorter attention spans (which I blame, in part, on their having been raised on Sesame Street and commercials), and a decrease in the number of words in standard twenty-something vocabularies.

And things will only get worse if we keep partitioning our students' brains into compartments that look like multimedia screens or CNN broadcasts. If fads like Twitter (no I will not post a link; I'm trying to forget that it exists) persist, attention spans will ultimately be truncated into 140 character bursts, just as Sesame Street trained millions of two-year-olds to pay attention for 1.5 minutes, and commercials narrowed that down to 30 seconds.

I've even found myself affected by this modern urge to get to the point immediately, with no rumination, no thinking-through: the need to come up with an answer in a "blink." Not long ago, I picked up George Eliot's Middlemarch, one of my favorite books ever, and snuggled down for a good long read. I knew that the novel takes some 250 pages to begin to come together, and for Eliot to start spinning her tale. But this time I wasn't really ready. I kept reading ahead, looking into later chapters, and essentially spoiling it for myself. Even though I already knew the outcome, I was impatient to get on with it. I can't even imagine a single one of my students who would be willing to work his or her way through this novel for the first time--at least not when they can go to NetFlix for a video version that cuts out all the "unnecessary description," as I've heard them say even about Tolkien.

My reluctance to buy into the latest techno-gizmo or web-sensation isn't helping. Even though I'm having some fun with the new apps I've added to my iPhone (now nearly a year into its two-year contract), I can't play a game (I only have two) for more than a minute or two. It's just a silly way to spend time. The light saber sound effects are cute, but now that every Star Wars fan with an iPhone has it, about the only thing we can do with it is have silly duels in the hallway. I do belong to a couple of online forums (properly termed fora, but I've learned how to choose my battles), but I will not, under any circumstances open a Facebook or MySpace account, won't go anywhere near Twitter (I only like tweets from birds, and quite frankly don't care to know when my congressman plans to scratch). I haven't joined LinkdIn despite numerous invitations (all from people I'm already "linked in" with in some way, and who have my e-mail address). I'm happy to take advantage of Google's many free services (like Blogger and the aforementioned e-mail account), but I have to draw the line somewhere.

When so-called social-networking and communication websites start taking the place of real conversation, and when sound bites substitute for substance, we're in trouble. When the trivial and banal take the place of real information, we're laying the ground for a future characterized by mindless, contextless blips of miscellaneous data. Reality TV and Twitter both seem to be the products of the same alien plot to disintegrate human minds.

And so a plea to my impatient students: take the five minutes or so required to slog through one of my posts, if only occasionally. You might learn something interesting, but if nothing else it will show you how to express a sustained train of thought, how to explore a path arising from curiosity, or just how to spend a few quiet moments reflecting on something that we will then have in common.

The students of the Bauhaus, about which my own students learned last week, had none of the electronic gadgets we now take for granted. Shunted from one city to another as the Nazis became more and more afraid of what imagination and creativity might mean to the future of the Third Reich, the students and instructors made do with what they had, and created the modern design school. Without them, our school wouldn't even exist. What made the enterprise successful, however, was the marriage of physical expertise and creative thinking--talents we're in danger of losing if we spend too much of our time plugged into our iPods and too little time just letting ourselves be curious.