Reading David’s posting on online reading and watching the McLuhan interview clip led me to ask myself a series of questions. What will our future students in classroom be like? Will they be significantly different from what we have now? What comes next after the X, Y, and Z generations? If the average attention span of “TV audience” is 4-5 minutes, what is the number for the Internet generation?
In light of the media’s role in the ongoing generational shift, I found N. Katherine Hayles’s article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” in the 2007 Profession very interesting. According to her essay, so-called “Generation M” (M stands for media, I assume), an age group ranging from 8 to 18 years old, spends average 6.5 hours everyday consuming media that are divided into 3.51 hours’ watching TV and DVD movies, 1.44 hrs’ listening MP3, music CDs, and radio, 1.02 hrs of Web surfing, 0.49 hrs’ playing video games, and 0.43 hrs of reading. I don’t think the statistics stands for the whole young generation, but it can still be something to be concerned about. What Hayles has observed in this research is that we are moving away from a generation of “deep attention”, the ability to concentrate on a single subject for long periods, toward a generation of “hyper attention”, the tendency to prefer multitasking and high levels of stimulation.
Yet, this simple distinction between deep and hyper attention is not what I found the most interesting. What is more intriguing is that the activities that Generation M are involved in using new media tools, for example, playing computer games, in fact, require a combination of deep and hyper attention skills. Hayles juxtaposes the experience of reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with playing the popular computer game Riven in the sense that both activities oblige students to have the ability to develop deep and hyper attention: for instance, sorting out useful information or remembering key clues in order to solve the multiple puzzles embedded in each text. She also offers a few suggestions about how to bring the digital media technologies into classroom, for example, reading difficult books alongside with online interactive stories that students are familiar with.
Hayles’s article makes me think about many possible ways that we as educators cope with challenges in today’s classroom, but there is one thing that troubles me. After all, it is quite expensive to have students and classrooms equipped with TV sets, computers and laptops, overhead projectors, and other media gadgets. So, unfortunately, the argument of incorporating technologies into classroom can go as far as the developed nations are concerned.
According to this article in today’s NYT, some folks are going the extra mile to bridge the gap between traditional texts and multimedia forms. Libraries hosting video game tournaments! I’m curious to see how much reading gets done at these. They appear to have such events at the New York Public Library, so those of us in New York should go check it out.