The Case for Digital-Free Zones

by Mike Davis, Ph.D.

Like many Americans, I have found myself thinking a lot about the impact of social media on society, school, and learning. When I first started teaching high school students in 1996, we had computers and email, but cell phones were still the size of a size-12 tennis shoe and not at all practical.

 

Fast-forward to 2017, and we all know the “connected world” in which we live. We have heard tech entrepreneurs and visionaries talk about an idealized “new” world that these connected technologies could create. They promised a world in which humanity could connect across cultures and come together to resolve problems. In some ways, they fulfilled these promises. Many things are easier to do because we are connected, and this “connection” allows us to be more effective and more influential in our work. But, we also know that this same technology and the various platforms that we use to interface with the world present many challenges and create many problems.

 

In this past election, we saw how some Americans isolated themselves from divergent views. We see unkindness communicated on a variety of social media platforms toward celebrities and innocent children. We see hate and invective on Internet sites with such frequency that it somehow seems to normalize both the sentiment and damage that it inflicts. We have heard talk of a “post-fact” America — something that would make our learned founding fathers shudder.

 

Institutional mistrust that has been steadily building since the 1960s has led to a diffusion of respected resources. Where we used to have trusted mainstream media and academic sources, blogs and self-publishing allow anyone to post an opinion as fact, even if that opinion lacks any basis in reality.

 

Technology has been disruptive in some positive ways, but it is clear to me that it has also disrupted our attention spans and our ability to communicate thoughtfully. So, is Mike Davis abandoning technology and innovation? No. I believe there are so many helpful and critical ways technology can improve our lives and the lives of others. Technology will continue to be ubiquitous in our lives. But, our use takes more careful thought and intention, and it is something for Americans to approach as critical to our culture and not to dismiss as a byproduct of progress. While we can’t dictate simple solutions, we can take action at our level if we are to prepare students for the complex and complicated world they are going to inherit.

 

In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a series of guidelines. For infants to two-year-olds, there is little evidence that screen time is beneficial to brain development. AAP guidelines say:

 

The study notes: “Population-based studies continue to show associations between excessive television viewing in early childhood and cognitive, language, and social/emotional delays, likely secondary to decreases in parent–child interaction when the television is on and poorer family functioning in households with high media use.”

 

But, we know there are many issues to confront: cyberbullying and harassment, sexting, negative impacts for mental health and well being, lack of sleep, and obesity, among many others.

 

For parents and students, I think we need to get more serious about how we manage these devices in our lives. This is something that we cannot legislate at school: we already have developmentally appropriate rules in place for use of mobile devices on campus. This is more of a question about individual choice. But, I hope that we are thinking things through carefully before we turn on any device we own. Although I could write about a myriad of challenges, I’d like to focus on two simple areas in an effort to get our community to be more mindful about our daily use of technology.

 

One area encompasses how social media and technology affect essential parts of our ability to focus (and therefore be successful and healthy in our academic professional, and personal lives) and the other deals with the quality of our interactions with our fellow human beings.

 

Something I think we all recognize is that technology and social media offer new ways of distracting our brains. I recommend an amazing book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen titled The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. In an interview with NPR, Dr. Adam Gazzaley shared some of the conclusions which every parent and teacher should think about.

 

With students being asked to do so many different things, often simultaneously, we risk stunting personal and professional growth. In short, multi-tasking is real problem: “One of the main theses we explore in the book is our ability, or really remark-ability, to set high-level goals, which is in many ways the pinnacle of the human brain.

 

These goals are complex, and this ability collides with very fundamental limitations in the skills that we have to enact these goals. We call those abilities cognitive control. We describe it in the book as a triad of: attention, working memory, and goal management, which include multi-tasking and task switching. When we switch between tasks, we suffer a degradation of performance that then could impact every aspect of our cognition from our emotional regulation to our decision making to our learning process, as well as real world activities like school and work and safety on the road.” The authors also make some interesting connections about memory and attention, which has an obvious impact on learning: “You remember things better in the short term because you’re focusing on them. That’s not wrong, but we’ve realized is that the highest level of performance in this domain of working memory is dictated more so by how well you filter all the irrelevant information. If you process information around you that is irrelevant to your goals, it will create interference. It will degrade those representations in your brain and you will not perform at the same level. Filtering, this is very frequently done subconsciously.

 

Sometimes you are actively ignoring, right? When you’re sitting in a restaurant or in a classroom and it’s noisy outside or someone is talking next to you and you’re trying to focus on the lesson and you realize that stimulation is getting into your brain that’s irrelevant. You may try to ignore it. Even when we’re not trying, our brains are filtering that, and our success at filtering that is critical for our ability to perceive information, to remember it and then to make decisions about it.”

 

Gazzaley’s suggestion for teachers and parents: “One of the things we talk about in the book is the need for us to re-train ourselves to become comfortable with sustaining our attention on a single goal and for young people, who may have never developed this skill, to learn the value and to appreciate the value and to even feel the value of sustained attention.”

 

Although we can do so many things virtually, I worry about the loss of personal interaction. I cringe whenever I see students sitting in groups all holding a cell phone and not speaking to one another. This is such an area of concern that, in the current issue of the newsletter, CA’s Director of Counseling Liza Skipwith also writes about this subject. I have been much bolder in recent years in going up to a group and calling them on it: “Hey kids, you are all sitting there, right next to one another, in your worlds with your phone. Talk to one another, it’s way more engaging.” I love the fact that at CA, face-to-face conversations happen all the time in the classrooms.

 

These personal encounters serve so many purposes. They help us communicate our ideas. They help us learn to persuade and argue. They help us understand social cues. While the “interview” in the college process has assumed far less importance, I don’t think there are many meaningful jobs that don’t require a personal interview.

 

The role that one’s emotional intelligence and public speaking plays in that process is critical to success. It’s self-evident that too much technology use and screen time stunts the development of those critical life skills.

 

An argument used to justify the use and proliferation of social media has been that it will help young people “get ahead.” Certainly, one’s digital footprint and the connections formed matter. But, there are other issues. Cal Newport is a millennial, associate professor at Georgetown, and author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. He wrote a great piece for the NY Times in which he outlines why young people should disconnect themselves from social media. He writes, “There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness, but the argument I want to make here is more pragmatic: You should quit social media because it can hurt your career.”

 

As a millennial who does not use social media, he notes he is an outlier for a generation that has been told, “…That it’s important to tend to your so-called social media brand, as this provides you access to opportunities you might otherwise miss and supports the diverse contact network you need to get ahead. Many people in my generation fear that without a social media presence, they would be invisible to the job market.” But there is a different reality: “The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about.

 

This is a philosophy perhaps best summarized by the advice Steve Martin used to give aspiring entertainers: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you do that, the rest will work itself out, regardless of the size of your Instagram following.” Cal Newport’s thinking speaks to the research of Gazzaley and Rosen: “Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.”

 I’ve written in the past about the importance of being a bit bored. Let’s do more to be boring, folks! It will actually help our students. At our opening assembly at the start of school, I mentioned the idea of exploring a no-technology day or possibly no-technology zones on campus (like the Campus Center) and the students cheered.

 

Expect some action this year. We need to take action to model for students. I am not naïve enough to think these technologies and platforms will disappear. But the health and well-being of our students and children demand that we be more intentional about how we interact with the digital world.