Electronic devices and digital communication have become integral to our activities as researchers, writers, teachers, and students (as well as citizens, netizens, and social beings). Like technology always and everywhere, they are both enabling and problematic, making our work more efficient and less efficient. We cannot live without a panoply of such devices and without these forms of communicating but we cannot live easily with them. We constantly face the challenge of how to make technology work for us rather than against us–and to understand what it is doing to us all the while.
As highly successful undergraduates, many of you are already reliant on devices for the note-taking, reading, and writing that learning and researching requires. If you are not, I strongly encourage you to become so as soon as possible. I am an academic technophile, not a technophobe. If you are not taking notes electronically, if you are not using online databases for journal articles, if you are not reading as much as possible on screen, if you are not composing on a keyboard, if you do not have bibliographic and image databases, then you are behind and need to catch up.
But train yourself wisely and not wantonly. The digital world in which we live is not only a material technology but also a spatial-temporal modality and a psychological disposition. As an anthropologist, I find this new life world in which so many of us are caught up to be utterly fascinating; as a participant, I find it nerve-wracking to be so perpetually poised on the edge of promise and peril. I feel the palpable dangers of knowing less and less about more and more and about connecting less and less with more and more. At the core of the digital world habitus is multi-tasking and it has afflicted many of us (myself included) with a chronic attention-deficit d
isorder. I am composing this passage on my netbook, which is attached to two large external monitors here in my office; my browser is open to four tabs and 10 RSS feeds, while I consult my bibliographic database and my note database, turning occasionally to two soon-due journal article manuscripts in Word and scanning a few sets of research notes on the side. And I am posting it as a page on our course web site, where you will read it wherever you might be in the world (and likely while doing a number of other things at the same time).
What happens when the classroom meets these digital technologies and communications has been a decidedly mixed blessing. A course is a delicate, small-scale intellectual sociality. It is a group of people who come together for a limited amount of time for a shared exploration of ideas and materials. We temporarily suspend our connections to the world around us in order to connect more effectively with each other.
My ban on electronic devices during class time is a way to insure that we can maximize our internal connectivity and minimize our external connectivity. It has its drawbacks but so does the alternative. I will assume your agreement with this as a matter of academic integrity.
A postscript: Perhaps you are like me and sometimes lack the self-discipline to suspend multi-tasking (in the misguided belief, or false hope, that simultaneous tasking is more effective than serial tasking). If so, you should consider internet blocking software. What I use with great success if a very inexpensive program called “Freedom.” As introduced on its home page, “Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to write, analyze, code, or create. At the end of your offline period, Freedom allows you back on the internet. You can download Freedom immediately for 10 dollars, and a free trial is available.” It is ten dollars well spent.