Rachel Dretzin response to Eliza Eddison

First of all, let me say how happy I am to see so many people commenting in our forum. This was the purpose of the Digital Nation project: to generate these kinds of discussions and take the documentary one step further in a way that only the web can do. I'm really pleased, because we hoped the documentary wouldn't be an end point but rather a conversation starter, an argument-inciter, an engine of discussion, disagreement, and process. And as Doug is going to continue this forum on a monthly basis, I hope you'll all continue to participate in the conversation.

I also wanted to respond to those among you, especially the MIT students, who felt that the documentary didn't fairly portray the situation at your school. As a producer, it's always hard to hear that someone was disappointed in the way their story was told. Unfortunately, it does happen, because we have to pick and choose only a few minutes to use on screen out of hours of footage we shoot. We always do our best to be fair and make sure we show the essence of what a person tells us, but inevitably, some people aren't happy with the end result.

This is an unusual film for me, because I was a correspondent as well as producer. I made this decision in part because I wanted to share my own take on how the digital world was impacting me, my family and those around me. I also knew my take was different than Doug's and I felt that conversation was helpful for our film because this is a world that we all see so differently. Take the comments on the forum - I find it so interesting that everyone sees sections of the film differently - that while some of you really responded positively to certain parts, others disliked them. I think your conversation is just more evidence of how early it is in the game and how much we bring of ourselves to the table when we talk about these technologies. That's why I decided to be as transparent as possible in the film itself about where I come from, and what I bring to the table.

So, in the interest of transparency, here's a little background about what may be the most controversial part of the film: the scenes at MIT.

We chose to film at MIT not because we thought it was typical, but because we figured MIT students would be the most wired, and perhaps the most intelligent that we could find on any campus. We were curious about how they were using digital media.. and frankly, we figured that if anyone could handle constant multitasking, it was them.

My team spent numerous days at MIT, talking to many students and professors and visiting classes, and the overwhelming majority of what we saw and heard from them was exactly what the program ended up portraying -- that MIT students are incredibly wired, that they multitask constantly, in and out of class, and that the majority of them find it difficult in many situations to focus on only one thing-- a book, a lecture-- for an extended period of time. We also found (and this was terribly interesting to me) that students are not apologetic about their work habits, but on the contrary, that they consider them necessary and at times, even laudable.

We heard something very different from several of the professors we spoke to at MIT and elsewhere. It was this contrast between the students and professors' perspectives that I found most interesting, and it's what informed many of my choices in deciding what to include in the program.

We filmed in at least four different classes on the MIT campus, and found lots of students using laptops in all of them. Although our focus in the program was not on the density of laptops in classes, but on how they are being used, in one case - with Professor Jones, we did request that the teacher of the class ask those students who normally bring laptops to their classes bring them to his class on the day we were filming.

Although one can debate whether we should have made this request, the scene we filmed in Professor Jones' class with students on laptops didn't change our take away of our time at MIT. In fact what I found was that students at MIT bring laptops to lots of classes, and they multitask on those laptops, as the students themselves readily described in the documentary. The issue of whether this kind of multitasking is positive, negative, or a bit of both, is something that's being heartily debated on this site and elsewhere.

I'd love to continue talking...and welcome any and all thoughts. I can't thank all of you enough for your participation.