by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University

I assigned the students in one of my classes to keep a log of their individual media consumption for a day or two. One student worried that she wouldn’t have much to record. She called herself a newspaper and magazine person and a TV-news watcher, naming traditional media she consumed at home but had little time for while at college. But after completing her log, she realized that she was as hooked on the “instant gratification” of social media and mobile phone apps as any of her peers. She had just come out of the “Dark Ages” when she got an iPhone for Christmas. And already, she was dwelling in the speedy little thumb-tapping world that is mobile, digital, omnivorous, freely given and as addictive as a drug.

When she and other freshmen females had to leave their mobile phones in the dorms during rush parties at sorority houses, she nearly had a “mini heart attack” feeling for her phone to check the time: A part of her was missing. It gave them all a “lost feeling” to be without their phones, she said.

This is the world our students inhabit today, so different from just a few years ago. They wake with an alarm app, and they breathe digital vapors all day long, whenever it is allowed, until they drop off to sleep. They check Facebook, news headlines, Tumblr, email, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. They shop without going anywhere. They watch TV or movies on Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube. In the background, they choose their music from an automated custom-genre service like Pandora.

It is a little freaky trying to teach these students about mass media, a huge subject that has suddenly miniaturized and coiled itself like the double helix of DNA into those little devices I make them turn off during class.

The students also realize there is something weird and amazing about the world they navigate this way. They seem to have mixed feelings about it. One student said she walks to class every morning dodging people without looking up from the screen in the palm of her hand. “I have mastered the art of walking through campus while only looking up every 30 seconds thanks to my hypnotizing fun-sized computer that I carry around with me everywhere.” Another student confessed trying to avoid an awkward silence between himself and a student in the elevator by taking out his new iPhone 5 and checking his email, for the seventh time that morning in an hour. The other student did the same. And this is at a small liberal arts college that prides itself on civility and “the speaking tradition,” a duty to say something in passing.

In essays these 24 students wrote about their media-use logs, I notice some patterns:

1. Keeping a log opened their eyes. They didn’t realize how engrossed they had become, particularly in mobile devices, until they had to keep a log hour-by-hour. Some were “amazed.” One, having her father keep a log for comparison, found the difference “drastic” in terms of time spent and type of media used. The students had been aware of the fact that mass media are “inescapable” and “ever-present.” But as one said, “I was quite unaware of just how much I personally expose myself to different forms of media throughout the day.”
2. You can’t beat it for convenience, relevance, fun, efficiency. . .any way you want to look at it. The environment for this generation has been built to make consuming digital media inescapable, always there, Semper Wi-Fi. As time seems to accelerate every year, they appreciate the efficiency of the technology. “The iPhone is the single greatest utility tool I’ve ever encountered,” one student wrote. “It’s so efficient to use. . .slide it out of the right pants pocket with one hand. . .press down on the top lock button with the index finger. . .check the screen for notifications. . .slide it back into the pocket. Everything that I need to do and know is essentially possible on this sleek hand-sized piece of metal. Everything.”
3. The fun and functionality are mixed, for some, with a sense of guilt. Running through their essays was a tone of confession. They have followed too much the digital devices and desires of their own hearts. Some labeled their own behavior as “addicted,” “wasted time,” and “stalking.” They felt guilty about not reading books and newspapers, although most felt they were “keeping up” with the news in real time by browsing headlines and Twitter feeds. Most recognized that mobile news and information can distract as much as illuminate. “Distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Burnt Norton,” a 1936 poem that, eerily, blames such distraction on “this twittering world.”
4. Atonement for whatever sense of sin they may have lies in finding a more physical way of being in the world. One student seemed to take pride in being a mix of the old and new, in that she goes places without her cellphone and avoids e-books. “I relish the feeling of opening up a new book and taking notes in the margins,” she writes. She worries about the next generation losing “people skills.” In her sociology class, she had read the book by MIT’s Sherry Turkle Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Another book-loving student said she prefers direct contact with people, so has no smart phone.

I share much of my students’ excitement and amazement. I marvel at the power of wiki-knowledge, the light-speed of search engines, and the journalistic possibilities of social media. But I wonder about the way our students learn and know stuff under this regime. Neil Postman, the late great thinker about media, argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business that TV presented a whole new epistemology – how we know and understand things – compared to the book-reading and writing culture through which knowledge, democracy and science had been developed for 500 years. But digital information is something new again. It is print, radio, TV, conversation and the world’s libraries and newspapers, all at once. What is the epistemology of this alone-together world of our students today? I’d like to know.