learning in the village of distractions. a mcluhanian outlook

History of Media Communication Sciences Covilhã, Portugal January 2014

[1]

Learning in the Global Village of distractions:

A McLuhanian outlook on the “Digital Student"

Anca-Ioana Toma (33117)

As technology develops, the term “option” becomes as much of a threat as an

opportunity. In the scholar landscape, having trouble keeping a student focused is no

longer just a matter of attention dysfunctions or boredom. It also relies on the difficulty

of teaching in a continuously updating informational system. Gadgets have turned the

classroom into a perpetual distraction and Internet has linked students with the outside

world into a huge, McLuhanian global village. This work is not about the means of

educational technology or the development of eLearning, even though they are not to be

left out while talking about the condition of this century's studentship. The scholar's

condition and his overall college experience in the global campus, if we can call it so,

are being held against a wall of mediatic deviations. Mostly by choice, sometimes

through sheer loss of grip, he is evolving into a hyperlinking individual, not only in the

way he documents a topic online, but also in the way he thinks, reacts and builds any

form of academic address.

Keywords: digital classroom, collective intelligence, participatory culture,

convergence, tech narcosis, numbness, understanding media, autoamputation.

I use the Internet more to organize myself, and for banking and shopping."

"I use everything a lot more since I came to university. My laptop is on all day so I can

check what's going on, what I should be doing, and so I can Google anything."

"I write essays at home so I can browse the internet and watch YouTube when I have

writer's block."1


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These are just a few assertions made by contemporary students from three top British

universities, King's College London, Sussex and Cambridge University. For them and

millions of other members of their generation the concept of media convergence is a

novelty that came naturally in the context of technological improvement. For the ones

that arrived right in the middle of this paradigm, the digital addiction is even less

surprising. It’s literary innate. Today’s classroom is digital in the same sense the

newsroom is. Teachers have the tools, the means to control, dose and present

information in the manners used by New Media to attract readers, viewers and so on

and so forth. Students are, now more than ever, subjects to the allurement that teaching

techniques are capable of.

But as the development of technology immerses itself into the learning practices, we

notice that, sometimes, the method takes over the content, thus leading to a Digital

Akademia1, one where the focus is gradually stolen by the interactive, multimedia

devices and methods. The problem that institutions are facing, if it is acceptable to call

it a problem, is not only a matter of “What is to be done with so much digital content?”

or “How do we adapt to this changing environment?”. It is also a matter of bringing the

eyes of the students back to the professor and off the second screen.

Looking back at the statements above, we notice how the Internet and the New Media

have taken over simple actions like organizing, basic research or constructive

procrastination. Writer’s block, for example, an issue that people from students to great

philosophers have been confronted with, is being outgrown with the help of artificially

produced stories, digital information, as opposed to further reading, contact with nature

or other recreational actions. Google has become a powerful tool when it comes to

superficial research and it keeps building its settings and resources in order to provide

students (and not only them) with the option of researching solely online (Google

Books, Scholar, Docs, Code, Translate) and one of its strongest feature is being Mobile.

It is the strongest for the product, but it changes the whole process of studying not only

by providing the students with possibilities to learn, look things up and research

anywhere, but also with a sum of distractions.

1 From Plato’s initial Akadēmia (Ἀκαδήμια).


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All the organizing, writing, checking and creating is, more and more often,

accompanied by procrastinating, addictive hyperlinking and second screening. “In

writing, there is first a creating stage – a time to look for ideas. You explore, you cast

around for what you want to say. Like the first phase of building, this creating stage is

full of possibilities”, said the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in the

19th

century. His words mark a huge difference in overcoming creative blocks between

centuries. The stage mentioned by the author applies to any student today, only that it is

transformed into a series of online diversions.

The Web University – a parallel to online journalism

The eve of scholar digitalization has been rather short. Given that most projects related

to creating digital support for content were already developed by education related

institutes, it was not surprising that universities all around the globe quickly found

themselves obliged to create an online medium of managing students’ information, their

evaluation, curriculum, tutorial support. Now, universities are digital environments on a

macro and a micro level. I am hereby referring to as “macro” the elevation of online in

the structure of the institutions. The term “virtual campus” appeared as a consequence

of how universities, as all other media organisms, saw it necessary to exist on the

Internet, to be alive and present there and to offer materials, assistance and possibility of

contact to students and potential students.

But it is the “micro” level that I want to bring focus towards. I chose this “micro level”

collocation to talk about the activities in which students engage online during classes,

homework or any other campus context.

The digitization of a student’s life looks similar to how journalism acts when

transported into the “www”. Hypertextuality, interactivity and multimediality are some

of the key characteristics of online publishing2. Looking at the way a student is

constantly prone to distractions coming from the same medium, we notice that the most

important elements that keep him engaged are the fact hypertextuality – always having

something else to link to, something more and more attractive, interactivity – being

able to keep in touch with people, to comment, to leave your unique mark upon online

2 The Web and its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of Different Types of Newsmedia Online,

Mark Deuze, June 2003


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platforms and multimediality – constantly being hit with videos, pictures, audio files,

games, infographics and so on and so forth.

More traits of the media add up to the analogy as the years go by. Every social media

platform and almost very website offers the possibility of customization, a tool that

provides, in this, case, the student, with reminders and materials that refer to his areas of

interest, his hobbies and even study domain. Moreover, the “push” resources used by

these platforms generate announcements in order to get the user to check his phone or

other gadget as often as possible. This way, just like the nature of webjournalism,

distractions are instantaneous, given that the technological possibilities have made

users feel like they should accept the distractions as they arrive. Postponing until the

next mental break or even until the actual break during university courses has become

obsolete. Messages have to be checked immediately; Facebook send notifications right

to your screen and other applications do this so often that users seem to have developed

a mental pattern that leads them into thinking it is best to know now. Everything is

urgent.

Another journalistic trait that is followed by the digital student’s behaviour is ubiquity.

For a media institution, being online means being able to connect quickly, to offer

information in new formats and to adapt to a new age. Being mobile means being

everywhere the consumer goes, so that it can provide him with information that he

doesn’t even know he needs. For a university student, mobile means carrying

everything you need or don’t need on one or more devices. While taking notes in class,

on a laptop, the student can use another device as a “second screen”. This concept has

become popular in media and advertisement due to the fact that so many people use it.

In fact, a College Explorer study undergone in the United States in 2013 has concluded

that 49% of the American college students use a second screen while watching

television. Furthermore, 37% of this half actually do school work at home while

watching T.V.3 Studying becomes, in this case, the second screen, because it can be

done on a computer, with a functional Internet connection.

The second screen can be perceived as a technological response to something that has

become almost a physiological need amid new generations: to keep up with the huge

3 http://infogr.am/US-College-Student-Tech-Trends-2013


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flow of information. In this particular case, a student’s attention is always divided

between the information he can get live, in class, and everything he can find out online.

In the pragmatic economic reality, the second has turned into a tool. SecondScreen

Networks, for example, is a company that has built a system of synchronization between

what we watch on T.V. and what ads we get on the devices that we use while doing so4.

This way, advertisers can make sure that the viewer catches a glimpse of what he could

buy in a perfectly “vulnerable” moment. In a classroom, sometimes the lecturer and his

address can become the first screen, being overshadowed by the second one, the

Internet, social media and more.

Moreover, the second screen concept is believed to be easily transformable into a

positive tool for professors. As the director of informatics at research Purdue

University, U.S., puts it, “similarly [to television], devices may compete with what's

going on inside of the classroom. But, they don't have to be distractions, as now there

are so many different ways to use them to plug additional, highly relevant material into

the class”5. The idea was to take advantage of the technology that students carry with

them, rather than lose the battle for attention in their favour. For this purpose, Bowen

points out that, during any hour-long lecture, a student will most like use one app for e-

text, one for accessing materials on the Internet, one to create notes based on the live

lecture and an additional app for social interactions and discussions. In order to let him

use all these while still capturing most of his attention, Purdue University’s idea is to

synchronize these app according to specific points of the lecture. These types of projects

define the level to which attention has become something that not only do we want but

we have to fight for.

When the medium is the autoamputation tool

Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan made the notion of medium as an extension

of the man famous in his works. Conceptually close enough, Jay David Bolter and

Richard Grusin defined the medium as “that which remediates”6 in the sense that all

new media work as a remediators, as ways of interpreting, of refashioning the old ones.

4 http://www.secondscreen.com/how-it-works

5 Hacking the Classroom: Purdue U's Approach to Augmented Learning, Mary Grush,

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/09/18/hacking-the-classroom-purdue-us-approach-to-augmented-learning.aspx 6 Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Cambridge: MIT Press,

2000


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When we look down at a classroom today, we see tablets and laptops taking the place of

the notebook. The old trick of exchanging paper cards during class has been

“remediated” into Facebook messages, for example. Admittedly, the phenomena is not

all-embracing but it is massive enough to raise awareness.

These remediators were seen by McLuhan as “extensions of man”, as the author

postulates in “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, in 1964, an a priori

observation that in our given context, today, makes more sense than ever. An even more

in-depth look at how this applies to the digital student of our era leads to the process

that McLuhan calls “autoamputation”. With every technical gain, he explains, we

experience a correspondent physical loss and the gain – a form of media – becomes the

prosthetic version of what we lose. Unlike Heidegger, for instance, who regarded

prosthesis as destructive because it supposedly takes away the distinctive character of

the original medium, McLuhan saw it as a form of enrichment, of connecting the old

and the new media. However, this process still has the risk of numbing down the

extended sense.

An extension appears to be an amplification of an organ, a sense or a function, that

inspires the central nervous system to a self-protective gesture of numbing of the

extended area, at least so far as direct inspection and awareness are concerned.7

Technology amplifies us, especially in the sense of making us multitasking beings. But

the numbing side effect is not to be forgotten. Looking at the digital student through the

eyes of McLuhan’s media prosthesis theory, he looks like he is suffering of multiple

amputations. Everything from the written word to the spoken descriptions has been

hewn. His imaginative capacities may not be destroyed yet, but it is now so much harder

for him to picture something that is described verbally. He has witnessed so many blasts

of visual information that it is difficult for him to imagine things otherwise than how he

saw them on the Internet. This is why he needs visual support for so many things that

are explained in class – so that he can objectify an idea and have an illustrated reference

of a certain theory, a concept and so on.

It is this hypervisibility that can make him sometimes irresponsive to mono-stimuli. He

needs multimedia in order to perceive things that could have been pictured by him in a

7 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, Chapter 18: The Printed Word


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very particular, customized way. But due to the fact that everything is a little too visible,

we might say, some of his capacities have been debilitated. Technology gives so much

to wonder upon, that imagination gets trapped between what we see and what we could

see if we didn’t already know what it looks like.

We know that technologies can be attention collecting, attention protecting and attention

structuring. Even those devices built to protect attention require attention, just like

everything else. For example, there are mobile applications designed to remind the user

of a certain date, action, deadline and so on. Those programs work at getting him to

(re)pay attention to something only if he is attentive enough to remember to put them

into motion. Students in particular use apps on their smartphones to keep up with their

own life events, some of the most popular being Due, Astrid, COL Reminder or

Checkmark. Also, there are many applications designed to help the student focus better,

limit his attention to a single app at a time, block distractions coming from a specific set

of websites or build a schedule of regular breaks in order to keep his focus sharp. This is

indeed a massive paradigm shift – going from barely noting a date on a piece of paper

or creating a written agenda to needing special help to keep our minds, eyes and focus

on something or to multitask effectively.

We have to ask ourselves if this issue affects all sorts of acts of creation and research or

if it is actually beneficial for some areas of study. However, some trials have shown that

students who chose to totally shut down their digital life during exams, for example, get

better grades. Carnegie Mellon researchers interrupted a classroom with text messages

while they were taking a test and the ones who had their phones turned on got scores

that were 20 percent lower than the scores of those who turned them off. More than a

problem of numbers and grades, the cropped attention span that we are draw from our

today’s digital environment can affect our brains on long term. McLuhan used to say

that we are particularly reckless when it comes to understanding the transforming power

of the media. It is easy to explain and theorize how technology changes the way we go

about our days, but it’s difficult to be actively aware of the mutations. We accept them

and the sources of change (devices, software etc.) through a process of “closure”, but

we don’t seem to be able to tell that they are as intuitive as any biological function. The

problem with these prosthetic arms, eyes and even consciousness is that they amputate


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or, on a lighter note, they reduce the uniqueness of each person’s senses, leaving us with

a feeling of perceptive uniformity.

A student’s reaction to the buzzing of a phone is not always as offensive or rude as it is

natural. As natural as “natural” gets in such an artificial context. Some of them haven’t

been in a distraction-free environment for years, some of youngest – never. There are

images and sounds that we frequently perceive in a computer mediated way.

Experiences that we become more and more comfortable with when they are mediated.

And the university lecture is definitely one of the things that students are trying to

engage in while remaining totally connected to their online life. Even if they are capable

of giving it up for a few hours, during classes, the choice tends to be in favour of the

gadgets and against their own attention capacities.

Incomplete solitude

You can’t be alone in the Global Village. In 1962, when McLuhan popularized this term

in “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, he associated it with the

idea that electric technology has made our world a more compact place. The level to

which the Internet was going to add to this notion was probably hard to imagine even

for the keenest visionaries.

The contemporary Global Village is mostly conceived as the network created by the

Internet. In this space of freedom of opinion, where everybody is asked to customize

his/her needs of information, to contribute, to react and to share, boundaries still exist.

But on an academic level, the existence of a Global Village has transmuted the average

sized classroom into a room that can hold not only the students but all their online

connections, from friends and family to foreign acquaintances. As long as they are

connected to the network, the students are never alone with their papers or thoughts or

the professor.

When asked how many times they used a digital device for non-classroom related

activities on a typical school day, 34.9% of 777 students from six American universities

answered with “1 to 3 times”. This gets critical when the study, developed in late 2012,

shows that 14.8% of them said they do that “more than 30 times”. That is almost a sixth

of them who are basically spending school time online. 66% of them said that Social

Networking is what keeps them engaged with their devices and about 70% said that


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“staying connected” was the motivation for that8. These numbers are proof of how

important it is, in a student’s perspective, to keep in touch, to be present in the network

as much as possible, as if with every Facebook, blog or Twitter post his life would be on

the verge of changing.

While Romantics found solitude one of the most culturally rewarding experiences of all,

we find ourselves completely wired to multiple worlds, online and offline. American

author and teacher Lionel Trilling wrote, in 1952, about the existence of a “modern fear

of being cut off from the social group even for a moment”. While it applied very well to

the modern, expanding metropolis, it works even better in the context of our Internet-

based Global Village. Solitude is terrifying for the contemporary youth because it is

hard to encounter a feeling of complete isolation when you are surrounded by tools

meant to connect you with the world.

Most students today are missing solitude as a social and psychological exercise. Even

friendship has been contorted, as its meaning keeps changing along with the number

and concept of Facebook friends, followers and so on. Some of the young people today

don’t want to be alone because they have never experienced the benefits of such state of

mind and they’re never been equipped with an understanding of what solitude does to

the artistic side of a person, his self-consciousness, his fears and overall personality.

Introspection is a ritual that bears antipodal meaning for the digital generations and the

older ones.

In a similar fashion, reading in print has borrowed some of the reading practices on the

Web, like the diagonal regard, the skipping and so on. Some of the values of reading

have been lost and the activity itself has inherited a dangerous pragmatism: students in

particular feel like they should be reading only if the reading makes sense to his

academic endeavours. By following this motivation, students can become too strictly

connected to their list of mandatory lections, thus transforming reading into an

economy, an exchange of knowledge with grades instead of an exchange of ideas,

thoughts, insights. And maybe the digital generations cannot numb their thirst for

8 Digital Distractions in the Classroom: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related

Purposes, Bernard R. McCoy, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Journal of Media Education, Vol. 4, No.4, October 2013


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knowledge through reading, but they can obliterate the importance of reading as a time

to connect with themselves, as a time of solitude.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. – Fernando Pessoa, “The

Book of Disquiet”

Such perspectives as the one Pessoa has left us with are the ones we should fear losing.

If we were to contextualize his remark into contemporaneity, we would find ourselves

asking “which life, online or offline?”, “does ignore mean not see or not respond?” and

most importantly “which literature, the one in our bookcases or the Web?”.

The Global Village has given us many options. Academically speaking, alternatives

would never be a problem if they wouldn’t come as an overflow. Socially speaking,

choices wouldn’t be dreadful, if they weren’t so varied and so many. On any level, the

Global Village membership wouldn’t be a threat if it wouldn’t kill so many old values,

principles and practices.

The digital student is given more options than ever, with apparently fewer regulations.

More freedom of choice, yet less freedom of imagination. And because he can read,

listen, watch, and create so much more than the average student before the Digital Age,

he sometimes chooses to do so less. In “Being Digital”, Nicholas Negroponte described

this era as a society of “tell me more”9, of multimedia thirst, of hyperlinks. The depth

and breadth coordinates of a piece of information have been blurred out as the barriers

between general and specific are now easier, if not recommended, to push. Attention is

a purchasable good, solitude in the Romantic, genius-nurturing sense is almost a myth

for the new generations and universities are still building up to a coherent attitude

towards education in the digital campus, both didactically and socially. Meanwhile,

students may find themselves solitary only when trying to figure out their choices in a

hypervisible, hyperconnected, attention grabbing world.

9 Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, 1995, p.69


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References Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan

Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte

Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

Web references The End of Solitude, William Deresiewicz, The Chronicle, 2009

http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708

The disappearance of the invisible, António Bento

http://www.urbi.ubi.pt/pag/9476

Giving attention to attention, António Bento


Solitude in Cyberspace, Piret Viires and Virve Sarapik

http://www.eki.ee/km/sarapik/Viires_Sarapik_Solitude.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/digitalstudent/views

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/prosthesis/

http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708



http://www.eki.ee/km/sarapik/Viires_Sarapik_Solitude.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/digitalstudent/views

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/prosthesis/

learning in the village of distractions. a mcluhanian outlook

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