Supertask me: is the digital world turning kids into junkies or making them smarter?

Detractors say the digital world is turning kids into screen junkies. WIRED’s Tom Cheshire finds data that says it’s actually making them smarter
Tom Cheshire7 November 2013

Young people have never faced so many demands on their attention. Two thirds of UK 12- to 15-year-olds now have a smartphone, according to an Ofcom report last year — a 50 per cent rise from 2011. More and more, children’s time online is spent switching between websites and apps, with new must-haves popping up every month: you’ve heard of Snapchat but what about Keek, Viber and Phish? By the time you read this there’ll be more new arrivals.

According to another report published in 2012, most teenagers use their phones for 18 main activities, from texting to taking photos, skipping between an average of 41 apps. But 65 per cent use their phones for social networking — more than for taking photos or playing games. Combine that with screens at home, and young people are packing more media use into less time: according to a 2010 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, US teenagers spend seven hours and 38 minutes consuming media.

But as they can engage with more than one type of media at the same time — TV, IMing, browsing websites and social networks, texting — they consume 10 hours and 45 minutes’ worth of content in those seven hours. They also encounter digital media earlier: according to Ofcom, a third of UK three- to four-year-olds regularly go online.

What is hyperstimulation doing to children’s brains? Surely nothing good: Manfred Spitzer, a German neuroscientist, calls it “digital dementia”. According to him, a generation is voluntarily lobotomising itself with digital hyperstimulation, reposting Tumblrs until catatonia comes.

Earlier this year, Susan Greenfield, the distinguished neuroscientist, sounded the alarm (again): “Already we are seeing a generation of twentysomethings still living at home, wearing onesies, craving the constant attention of others through social networking sites... The speed required for reaction and the reduced time for reflection might mean that those reactions and evaluations themselves are becoming increasingly superficial.”

Specifically, the problem is multitasking, which in fact does not exist: humans are only able to pay proper attention to one task. “Multitasking” actually means rapidly switching attention between tasks, which has a cost because we spend a lot of mental effort on the switch, rather than the task itself.

“By multitasking frequently, we are shaping our brain to be better prepared to rapidly toggle between tasks,” says Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the US National Institutes of Health. “However, the cost is that brain processes devoted to deeper thinking and deliberation are less reinforced and thereby become less developed.”

But there’s little research to support such dire warnings. Peter Etchells, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol, says: “Anyone who does any research in neuroscience or psychology knows that everything changes the brain — that’s the foundation of how we learn.”

In fact, research from around the world might be showing the exact opposite: that technology is making children more sociable, more expressive and more creative. And, although children are certainly more digitally distracted than ever, they are much better than adults at dealing with this disturbance. In the right environment and with the right techniques it could be making them smarter.

Toys fill the shelves and litter the floor in a small room in the University of Sussex. One is a large Playmobil fort, an experimental interactive version developed with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. A researcher waddles a dragon around it: when a chip embedded in the figure gets near another, the dragon roars.

Nicola Yuill, head of the Chat Lab, a research unit specialising in children and technology, has found that the technology, far from being a distraction, engages children’s attention and makes them more co-operative.

Other research she has conducted shows that children playing picture consequences are more creative when they do so on an iPad, compared with drawing on paper. “People have this fear that children are addicted, that they can’t keep from being distracted,” says Yuill. “I think we put that worry onto children — but they have strategies.”

Some of these strategies tend towards multitasking, which children are learning at ever younger ages. Lydia Plowman is a professor in education and technology at the University of Edinburgh. Earlier this year, she studied how pre-school children interact with dual screens such as an iPad and a TV.

“Based on our small sample, we had the feeling that operationally children can do this kind of flipping,” she says. “My guess is that teens would be able to do that more rapidly and intuitively than these young children.”

As part of a large study of how children learn with technology and toys at home, Plowman spent time with more than 50 three- and four-year-olds with their families. “At three years old, Colin, with his five-year-old sister, was communicating with relatives in Australia by sending them photos and messages containing emoticons [neither child could write] and using a webcam for video calls,” she says. Colin was communicating with relatives he had never physically met, before he had mastered the technical demands of written language.

There is still hope for multitasking. A 2010 paper found that some people can do it effectively: about two per cent of the UK’s population really have no problem with simultaneously talking on the phone and driving. The authors called these people “supertaskers”.

Last year Kevin Lui, a psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, set out to find if there were any benefits to multitasking. Lui thinks multitaskers who have to switch frequently between tasks will be at a disadvantage, “however, if the situation requires people to distribute their attention to all tasks concurrently, media multitaskers may be superior due to their breadth-based cognitive control”.

This is how teenagers tend to encounter the digital world: not switching between tasks, but as chefs keeping pots cooking on a hob, checking each one as and when.

It’s also easy to imagine that teenagers, multitasking from an early age, are more likely to be supertaskers. Even if not, those who have grown up with the web seem to have developed strategies to order demands on their attention in a hierarchical flux.

Teenagers are great at constantly ranking their priorities because the asynchronous technologies they like — texting, Tumblr — let them. “My son will be playing an online game with a book in his lap,” explains Mizuko Ito, author of Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out. “He switches attention to the book while the game is in a lull, and then he will switch his attention back to the screen when the game starts back up. This kind of attention switching is very different from being interrupted by, for example, a phone call... Since it isn’t under his control, it interrupts his focus. One reason why kids prefer text messaging to phone calls is that it is easier to text in the background of other activities and to manage multiple attention streams.”

What’s important is not that teenagers use smartphones, but how they use them. A study — now under review — by Reynol Junco, a psychologist at the Youth and Media lab at Harvard University, found that although first-year college students’ academic performance deteriorated when multitasking on social networks, the same was not true for second years and above: “Clearly, something’s going on; they’re developing skills to deal with that,” he says.

Danah Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft, identifies “super log-offs” — where teenagers deactivate their Facebook account instead of just logging off, and whitewalling, where users delete a Facebook comment or post after they’ve read it — as strategies for managing networked life.

THIS attention switching is well suited to now, and it will be even better suited to the future. A report by the Pew Internet Project in February last year asked 1,021 adult technology experts and critics how suited the younger generation would be to the world in 2020. “The essential skills will be those of rapidly searching, browsing, assessing quality, and synthesising the vast quantities of information,” said Jonathan Grudin at Microsoft Research. “In contrast, the ability to read one thing and think hard about it for hours will not be of no consequence, but it will be of far less consequence for most people.”

The workplace increasingly rewards those with a bottom-up exploratory attention and the rapid attention switching performed by teens in particular.

We need to stop scaremongering about technology, not just because it’s wrong but because it’s harmful. In another 2013 study, published in Computers in Human Behavior, Reynol Junco found that young people in the US overestimated the time they spent online by a factor of five: on average, they spent 26 minutes a day on Facebook but reported spending 145 minutes. “Society is telling them it’s bad, and they’re accepting it. That’s not how to raise a generation. We’re making youth feel bad about a normal part of their lives.”

We shouldn’t. Nor should kids have to come up with attention strategies on their own. Instead, we need to help children develop those skills. Take Heidi Siwak, a primary school teacher in Ontario. She gets her class involved in day-long Twitter projects, where, for example, they’ll debate a book on the Holocaust with people around the world. “You can only do it if your school lets you use Facebook and Twitter in school,” says Thompson. “What Heidi is doing is superb and a model for how you can do this. There’s inertia at an institutional level. But there are a thousand flowers blooming at a classroom level. And that’s the fun stuff to watch.”

Put digital technologies at the heart of education in ways that fit how children use digital media, so that they understand how to use them best. Hyperstimulation is changing kids’ development: we need to find out how, and how we can use it to supercharge them. With their plastic, adaptive brains and a digitally immersed upbringing, they could be the smartest, most creative, best-connected generation yet. Let’s help.

See the rest of this feature in the December 2013 issue of WIRED, out now.

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