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In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”

Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

Jazzing Up Lectures Question: Are you comfortable with a lecture style that is just a guy speaking to you, or do you think that colleges should add more flair or more pizzazz to lectures through video and PowerPoint, electronic stuff, and so on? Laura: Well, with the professor just lecturing to you it can get boring, so I think they need to. If they do not already have flair, they need to just add a little more instead of just lecturing notes. Deanna: I agree with her 100 percent. When there is a teacher lecturing to you in the front of the room, it is really boring. You do not get involved, and you tend to kind of zone out the whole time. I need more bells and whistles to keep my attention. Anthony: I think what they really should look at is how businesses are doing business because the student could say they want to learn a certain way, but if business is not working like that, they might not be prepared to actually go into the work force. So I think you definitely need to look at what the corporate world is doing and try to match with them in some ways. Going Out Into the Real World Question: How many of you think that when you get out into the work world and you are reaching your sort of earning potential, how many of you think you are going to make more money than your parents did? And do you think you will work as hard as they do? John: I definitely think we are going to be working more than our parents simply because of the integration of technology and the tools that we are required to learn and use in everyday business. ... Technology being there is going to force us to be more productive, so in an eight-hour day we are expected to do four, five, six times as much. Question: But the tool that was supposed to get rid of work makes work.

That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

Carr draws extensively from cognitive neuroscience literature to make his deterministic argument that the Internet is changing who we are. He weaves the findings together well, but on closer inspection, his use of the literature is occasionally questionable and at times outright indefensible. He seems to ignore the scientific literature that has actually found that new digital technologies might be better for how we learn (Gardner, 2006) and how we socialize (Pew, 2010). Furthermore, in his discussion of hypertext and the ways it hurts deep thinking, he draws from a Canadian study (Landow & Delaney, 2001) that, as Rosenberg (2010) argues, does not prove Carr's argument. The study was actually analyzing a specific type of hypertext fiction and was never meant to be extended to all hypertext. This example is a microcosm of Carr's book as a whole, a valid argument that extends itself too far.

Both Carr and Lanier provide inflammatory arguments about the Internet that will surely anger some readers. The strengths of these books are their ability to question widely held beliefs of digital evangelism and to make their criticisms accessible to mainstream audiences (though Gadget occasionally may get too technical for some). As we discussed above, the books do have their problems, but they may still prove valuable in an undergraduate course or any introduction to media criticism. Students would be able to read accessible accounts questioning widely accepted orthodoxy, and they would also be able to evaluate areas where each author takes his argument further than evidence allows.

Therefore, the impairing effect of multitasking upon learning may be related to reduced brain resources that are available to satisfactorily complete tasks when they're tried together.

Heavy media users report getting lower grades.  While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard.  About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users.  These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns. (Heavy users are the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17% of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day.)

"If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."