What would McLuhan think?

How can members of a family all live in the same house, but also live in different worlds? With laptops, cellphones, and other digital media, many people are living more in their digital lives than in their real-world lives.

It’s not just kids any more, now everyone seems to be multitasking online. We’re seeing big changes in the military, at work, and at play. Last week, Frontline looked at the wired world we live in.

They talked to students at MIT, who they mention are among the world’s smartest. These students don’t remember a time when they couldn’t be online anywhere they went. Many students use their laptops in their classes. The professors know that some of them are on Facebook, some of them are Googling, and some are even e-mailing other professors. Is that affecting the students’ grades? Is the wired world too distracting? Have the students done themselves a disservice? These students believe a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes. But is this so? Some things need to be thought about without distractions in order to learn.

The interview then moved to Stanford, where some studies are being done. The students seem convinced that they aren’t distracted. The studies compare the brains of multitaskers to non-multitaskers. They study how quickly the students can switch between tasks. Interestingly, the students who thought they were brilliant at multitasking had slower response times switching between tasks than doing one task at a time. This worries scientists because they wonder whether we’re creating people who are unable to think clearly. They suspect the multitasking is affecting the students’ analytical skills.

And creativity? When our days are spent Googling, e-mailing, networking, and so on, what have we really accomplished at the end of the day? Have we had any time to contemplate? Any time to be creative? Or have we distracted ourselves to death? Is it time to press the Pause button?