Thursday, March 12, 2015

Multiply-torn Attentions (Jones & Hafner, Ch. 6)

Perhaps a decade ago, “multitasking” was a hot word to put on resumes.  It showed that an applicant was hip to the digital world, and knew how to navigate its competing attention-takers.  This isn’t considered much of a skill anymore.  Being able to pay attention to multiple streams of information at once is just a condition of living in the modern world.  I think most people are now aware of the constraints on attention that Jones and Hafner detail in this chapter.

I hear from older colleagues that meetings used to be fewer and smaller when they were confined to physical rooms.  The combination of conference calls and live-streaming of computer desktops has altered what Jones and Hafner call attention structures.  The biggest change is in the communication tools.  The tools I mentioned make it possible to expand a meeting beyond a meeting room, or even a city.  This affects the other attention structures as well.  The number of people involved can multiply, bringing new perspectives to the meeting.  These people also have different social relationships, making the interactions in the meetings different.

The affordances of this technology are clear.  More people get to collaborate more easily on more tasks.  But the constraints are also obvious.  The easier and wider an invitation is to send, the more get sent.  This taps into what Jones and Hafner refer to when they speak of living in an “attention economy” (90).  It’s ironic that, the easier it is to get a hold of anyone, the harder it is to…well, get a hold of everyone.  And if someone has multiple invitations to tasks that may only require that they dial a phone number and watch a screen, they’re tempted to do as many of those tasks as possible at once.

As the authors explain with the computer classroom example, the key is to align our attention structures to the right context.  In the example of meetings, it seems wise to sparingly use technologies that physically remove participants.  Those who can meet in person should, while those who absolutely can’t can connect digitally.  In this sense, multitasking becomes less of a proactive killing-two-birds-with-one-stone activity, and more of an occasional convenience.


Jones, Rodney H., and Christoph A. Hafner.  Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction.  London: Routledge, 2012.

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree with your last statement, that the key is to use technology in appropriate situations, and avoid it when it's unnecessary. I think the interesting thing about technology—and sci-fi art will probably back this up—is that, because of its convenience, usefulness, and social trendiness, it ends up becoming an unavoidable object in most situations, regardless if that situation calls for it (a cybernetic revolution, some might say.) In fact, in many situations, not using technology seems to be almost a step back in time, signifying that the participants are not up to date with the modern standard. Since I don't use a phone that much, a few years ago I went back to the old flip-style, unsmart phone and so many people noticed it and commented to me about it, asking me why I didn't have a smart phone. It's like using a horse instead of a car—the evolutionary mechanism that drives technology forward pushes these technologies onto users without regard for attention structures. Can being digitally literate really change that? I suppose we will find out.

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  2. As technology and the open-source environment of the internet continues to create more ways to communicate, it certainly increases the bureaucracy in our lives. When it is so simple to get everyone together in conference calls and chat-rooms, it becomes easier to meet for the sake of meeting rather than to accomplish something. I believe in reguards to the internet and its application, we are still in a "wild-west" environment for new ideas and competition to become the latest app or social network. While this environment is slowly becoming more converged with one another, as Google and other conglomerates buy new venture technologies, and slowly create a central service with their own version of each population medium of communication (sms, e-mail, social media). While Facebook is the king of social media now, so was MySpace in the early 2000s, and users are still actively trying out new apps and services, filtering, and naturally the most useful or innovative will rise and fall in prevalence.

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  3. I recently heard somewhere that if I'm using a particular technology (like Facebook) then students (or children) are way past it. Part of that perspective comes from age. As we get older, I think we simply can't/don't want to attend to so many activities at once. I was slow to adopt Facebook and I don't post very often. I usually only post when I have news to share (e.g., receiving an award, my mother dying). I have friends, however, who post either every little thing they are doing or most things. I don't mind either one. The topic of collaboration is important to me because it is such an important part of my pedagogy. In the past, I have had students use various technologies to collaborate. Many of the students in my classes work full time and can't always meet in person. They turn to Google Docs or texting or Skyping to get their work done. These technologies work well if the students are engaged in the project. If not, I think it's harder for them to care about participating. For collaborative technologies to work, I think, requires the same level of attention that face-to-face conversations require. In fact, I think it takes more attention and students have to be willing to engage more fully. This issue is topmost in my mind because I taught a totally online class last semester and the collaborative project did not work as well as I had hoped. I'm still not sure why. I keep wondering what I could have done to help them engage more. I'm particularly concerned because I'm teaching another totally online class in the fall and I need to rethink my process. I'm nervous about this because I'm not sure (and haven't had the time to do the thinking) what needs to be changed. Not every student turned in a course evaluation so I'm not sure what they were thinking and how they were responding to the tasks I gave them. I wish we could just call up a student sometimes and ask specific questions. Of course, that would take away the anonymity of their evaluations.

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