Attention and Television

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of media to distract, and reading Maggie Jackson’s “Distracted.” I talked in an earlier post about not liking to wear headphones in public, partly because it keeps me from attending to the environment around me. Something then made me think of television. I grew up, for the most part, without television. Overseas we didn’t get a TV until I was eight or nine (every other year we'd spend a summer in the States, camped in front of the TV part of the time at least) and all we had was a small black and white TV on which we watched programs on AFRTS (Armed Forces Radio and Television) in Seoul. Though we had a TV from then on, our choices were rather limited.

In any case, what prompted this post was not a memory of TV growing up (and I’ve got enough anecdotes about that for later) but about TV when I went to college in San Antonio. My roommate and I did not have a TV and I don’t recall if our suitemates did. This was before the days when all the dorms were wired for cable TV (or internet access). I remember at the time being glad for not having a TV because I didn’t think I would get a single thing done if I had one. TV watching is sometimes a choice, but sometimes it’s a pull (something Jackson mentions in research of small children and TV: often they look at the TV not because they want to, but because their attention is pulled by the TV and its bright flickering pictures and funny noises). I tend to get pulled into TV, and find it hard to do anything else when it’s on—it’s got my attention. I remember one Friday night hanging out in a friend’s room where they had a large TV. We turned it on and, literally, the next thing I remember it was after midnight. Though we must have had some conversation, for the most part the evening was lost to the TV (and not for anything particularly interesting). It was something of a small shock to me and reaffirmed the fact that I was glad not to have one.

When I see dorms today, wired for cable and the internet, I wonder how they get anything done, how they concentrate, how they find long stretches of uninterrupted time to read, reflect, rework drafts of assignments—all the hard work of being a student. When I used to run my no media week in my classes at Clemson (students in my media class were to avoid any form of mass media for an entire week unless required for class or work—no TV, radio, CDs, films, magazines, etc.—and write diaries of the experience), some students would comment how they used to have trouble balancing all their classwork and finding time to get it done. I recall one student saying that they managed to get through all their weeks reading and work and starting reading ahead, and it was only Tuesday. Another student once said during that week, she could actually hear herself think, and felt less confused about things. These are anecdotes, individuals, nonrepresentative sample sets. But they have stayed with me.

I’m not saying that students need to live a monastic life, just that it would help. Being a student should be about time to learn and contemplate new ideas and information, and one needs less distraction to do so. For many students, especially my students here at ASU who work and have families and commute to school, they don’t have that luxury of time—life is distracting enough. I worry that our new mediated environment will make it harder and harder for students to really think (when they get the time free from work and family). No wonder they complain that they want clear bullet points in lecture that have a direct correlation to the test. Memorize some facts, learn some skills, pass the test and get your degree. You can do that fairly well in a distracting environment. There’s a place for that. But we’re losing a place for the other.