Henry Jenkins response to Mark Bauerlein

The issue of multitasking is an absolutely pertinent question to explore within a documentary and doing so may well prompt discussions we should be having about the impact of digital media on our culture. I am delighted to be participating in this exchange and think it's great that it brings together people who would normally be speaking in very different contexts. That was the strength of the website and why it is so useful in teaching these debates.

My problem is that the film seems to want to address three questions of very different levels of granularity --

1. the debates around multitasking. Here, the focus is too narrow on the computer as the cause of these problems. There are other questions we need to ask such as the degree to which issues of distraction, over-simulation, and multitasking would be a phenomenon of our lives even if computers did not exist at all. Indeed, that was the point of my one comment included in the documentary -- that these issues have been an ongoing concern throughout the 20th century. At worst, we can say that the computer has amplified or accelerated these phenomenon, but it does not create them and to deal with multitasking without dealing with the range of factors which have made our lives more complex, seems to offer an incomplete picture. ...

2. The second seems to be the issue of whether schools should allow lap tops. In that consideration, multitasking is only one issue we should be considering, since it is only one mode through which we engage with the computer. While the film seems to like it no better, what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts. I don't think we achieve that by leaving computers out of the classroom and telling youth to acquire those skills on their own without appropriate adult supervision and engagement. School based lap top programs model a range of different ways computers can be used productively towards personal and academic advancement -- they are not just excuses for a multitasking free-for-all.

3. The third seems to be what the impact of computers have been on our society. Here, I will give the film more credit for showing some productive kinds of engagement with the computer, but these examples come relatively late in the film after the core claims about media use as a social problem have been firmly established. Some of the most productive uses are indeed being done by niche segments of the population, though such practices may offer us models for how people can build more rewarding and productive relationships with the technologies. Some of them are quite wide-spread in the culture, especially among the young, though what has been rewarding about them has not yet been integrated into the schools and is only starting to be understood by researchers. The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.

Should the documentary report research which shows the gap between young people's perception of their multitasking skills and their actual performance, at least in so far as we've figured out how to evaluate it so far? Yes, of course, but it is only part of a more complex picture. I also think that they should report the diverse range of cultural practices which emerged from the Digital Youth team's large scale ethnography of teen's on-line lives and the kinds of practices which seem to support robust informal learning outside the classroom. Unfortunately, this research ended up on the cutting room floor. Some of it is on the web. None of it is in the program.

Before I sign off, let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.

I hope to write more soon about what I see in the MIT sequence of the film as someone who taught at MIT for 20 years and who lived for most of that time in an MIT dorm. But this will have to wait for another day.