Pulitzer-winning journalist John Markoff moderates a discussion on the effects of digital technologies on memory, cognition, & society w/Byron Reeves, Nilam Ram, Abby Smith Rumsey & Maryanne Wolf.
Show page with suggested readings
The Human Screenome Project
Social Science for a World in Crisis
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. With millions around the globe practicing social distancing, technologies of convenience have become technologies of necessity. And we run the risk of being more glued to our screens than ever before. Though increasingly indispensable, some of these technologies are eroding our memory, our comprehension, and our deep learning abilities. But what are the long-term consequences? Today on Human Centered, we're bringing you another episode in the CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. This episode, which originally webcast December 8th, 2020, is titled The Digital Dilemma in the Time of COVID and it features panelists Nilam Ram, professor of communication and psychology at Stanford University and a CASBS fellow in 2013-2014; Byron Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards professor of communication at Stanford and a CASBS fellow in 2014-2015; Abby Smith Rumsey, a historian and author of the book When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future; and a member of the CASBS Board of Directors. And lastly, Maryanne Wolfe, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, and a CASBS Fellow in 2014-2015, and also a member of the CASBS Board of Directors. Moderating the conversation is Jon Markoff, Pulitzer Prize-winning technology journalist and a 2017-18 CASBS Fellow and longtime research affiliate. Who is also currently a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Markov asked the panel to discuss our contemporary habits of endless scrolling, skimming, and scattered attention, and how they affect our ability to empathize, critically analyze, and understand misinformation. Are these changes novel when compared with previous technological shifts in history? And what can we learn from new techniques which measure our physiological and psychological states while engaged in these behaviors? What are the implications for influencing the intellectual, social, emotional, and ethical development of younger generations?
John Markoff: I'm John Markoff, and I'll be our host this afternoon. I was a CASBS fellow in 2017-18, and more recently I helped launch CASBS's Human Centered Podcast. So welcome to the 11th episode of CASBS's webcast series, The Social Science for a World in Crisis. I first want to acknowledge co-sponsors for this episode: Bloomberg Beta, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Human Screenome Project here at Stanford. Okay, you've read the bios of our panelists, and the event promo provides links to their extended bios, so I'll quickly introduce them. We can jump into our discussion. Nilam Ram is a professor of communication and psychology at Stanford University and a 2013-14 CASBS fellow. Byron Reeves is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford and also a 2013-14 CASBS fellow. Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian and author, most recently with the book When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future, and she's a member of the CASBS board of directors. Maryanne Wolfe is director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, a 2014-15 CASBS fellow, CASBS fellow and member of the CASBS board of directors. So as you know, today's conversation is on the digital dilemma in the time of COVID If there was a subtitle for today, it would be, what are these machines doing to our brains, our society, and our culture? It's a topic of which the panel brings diverse perspectives and expertise. And imagine, for, for example, how life during this pandemic would be different without personal computers, smartphones, and computer networks. I think one thing that has changed in this generation in Silicon Valley is that social science and social scientists are being invited in to participate in the design of next-generation technologies based on their insights on the cognitive and societal impacts of this technology. So here's how we'll proceed. We'll begin with brief introductory comments from Mary Ann, Byron, Ilan, and Abby, and then we'll jump into our conversation. And just a brief note to the audience, um, Feel free, if you'd like to help steer our conversation, you can submit questions using the Zoom Q&A feature, and I'll try to keep an eye on it and see if I can get you into the conversation. So let's begin. Mary Anne, why don't you go first, followed by Byron, Nilam, and Abby?
Maryanne Wolf: Okay, welcome to everyone. And first, thank you to Mike and Margaret and Megan and Sally and everyone at CASBS and my esteemed panel members whom I'm learning so much from already. I want to introduce us to actually the very concept of a dilemma. What a dilemma poses for us is potentially equally significant, equally true, potentially equally true perspectives that differ. And that's what we're going to have today about the digital world. As some of you know, I have recently finished a book, Read or Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. And I will be bringing a perspective from cognitive neuroscience to this. But before I do, I actually want to preface everything we're saying by my colleague Sherry Turkle's remark about technology itself. And she said, in paraphrase, that we err as a society not when we build the innovative and new, but when we neglect to understand what the new disrupts or diminishes. Now, from my perspective as a cognitive neuroscientist, I feel responsible for understanding what is being disrupted as well as being expanded by digital devices for our children. And I want from the start to state that the implications of understanding what different mediums do to the processes of the brain, especially the reading brain, has implications not only for the intellectual development of our children, but for the trajectory of our species and society. In other words, I'm going to make the, the bold assertion that what we are doing is trying to understand the relationships between what is being disrupted, diminished, and expanded expanded. And we as a species and as members of a democratic society, I want to make those links. Now to do that, I'm going to do the impossible. I'm going to do 4 lessons in 4 minutes from, from neuroscience about the reading brain and how that can give us a kind of example of how we should be trying to figure out the dilemma that is, that is even more ironically posed to us as all of us listen to each other. On digital devices. So the first thing that I want to state is very simple. No brain of yours or mine was ever meant to read. Rather, new inventions like literacy and numeracy demand a new circuit. Well, when we build a reading circuit, we did something really extraordinarily wonderful. We took something very basic, and over time, the thing itself expands from what it reads. So we moved, every child moves, and our species moved from very foundational skills in that circuit to this elaboration of deep reading processes that move from making analogies from what we know to what we read, to pulling together perspectives of others to infer Very importantly, to have an opportunity to take on perspectives that are outside of our own, to make inferences from them, and to build critical analytic models of what we're reading. In other words, reading has allowed our species to go beyond itself, to go beyond the information given. Now, that's number one, and if you will, number two. Number Number 3 as a lesson is tougher, and that is that circuit is plastic, and that plasticity means that it's going to reflect the writing system. Italian is different from French, is different from English, and all alphabets are somewhat different from Chinese or Japanese. More important for our conversation, the medium itself will be reflected in the circuit. And our, our last centuries have built a reading circuit that has been reflecting the emphases of those slower processes, cognitively slower processes. Print is doing that, has been doing that, and the digital medium has a different set of affordances that are also going to be reflected in the brain. Now bombardment of information requires us to have a formed a new mode of using that reading circuit. We have all become skimmers, but there's an implication that we really need to understand, and that is skimming is not the same as using, utilizing, deploying the more time-consuming deep reading processes. The questions this, this makes us have to confront as a panel, as a society, is what are the implications for the development of new reading brain circuits and their deployment in, in us who are becoming skimmers and not necessarily deploying those critical analytic skills, the empathic skills that have made us who we are. It's not that we can't. There is no binary. It's that we are becoming more and more accustomed to using less and less of those deeper processes. And so we're left with in cognitive neuroscience, understanding the evidence at every developmental epoch. In my last work, I'm working on understanding what a biliterate brain is, in which we are utilizing parallel paths of understanding the best of technology and also the best of print and bringing them together. So I'm going to end my remarks by saying that I'm going to actually end them with my— one of my favorite quotes from T.S. Eliot that I'm going to make backwards. He asked, where is the wisdom in our knowledge? Where is the knowledge in our information? I want to reverse that. I want to say, where is the knowledge in our information and how we process it? Where is the wisdom in our knowledge? All of us are about ultimately building that next generation of critically analytic empathic learners. Now go to it, the rest of us. Thank you.
John Markoff: Byron.
Byron Reeves: Thank you. I, I also want to, uh, thank CASBS for putting on this panel. I think one of the reasons that we all show up eagerly to panels like this is all the wonderful memories of being at CASBS. And in fact, for Nalam and me, the memories are what we're— one of the things we're going to talk about today because our collaboration started, in Two Carols overlooking the campus out on the deck, talking casually. I want to zoom out a little bit. So, I'm— Mary Ann has me concerned very much about what's happening now with respect to reading, but I want to zoom out and just take a media psychology perspective on all of the effects. I mean, this is— the effects of media right now have just— are enjoying apocalyptic status, you know, across across the board. There's concerns about health and democracy, social relationships, violence, poverty, the climate, just all of these things that are often put in the same, same bag. And we're all asked to try and make intelligent comments about what's going on, especially this year, because we're more concerned about media because we're all consuming and participating in it more. And oftentimes I feel as someone that's talking about these effects that were encouraged or expected to kind of show up with the data that actually will help inoculate us from this apocalypse, or at least describe what it, what it's like. But it's, it's huge concerns, uh, and what can you tell us about them? And the first thing I want to say about our project and about this Zoom Out is that this problem— there is a problem that the evidence that we represent in all of media psychology doesn't often match the concerns that are, that seem obvious to many who are participating, and then we are asking why is that the case? So that the journal science that's being done and the, the kind of the apocalyptic writing, and rightly so, concerns about what's happening, uh, there is a mismatch there, and one of the reasons we think this is the case is that Media experiences now defy any easy characterization. In fact, that may be the most difficult half of the equation of trying to put media against all these important concerns, whether it's reading and thinking, or political ideology and voting, or health issues, or developing, developing a relationship. Uh, it's very hard to talk about what's going on in that experience that is related to that concern that we've got. It's really complicated. We're just now seeing, in my view, the completion of the digital promise that was made 25, 30, 35 years ago. Much of life is now digitized. It's now— because it's digitized, it can be what we call mediatized. We can make an app out of it. And that's everything from the relationship I have with you to managing the home irrigation system in my backyard. It's just all of life is now on the, on the screen, uh, and it's being funneled through fewer and fewer screens. The smartphone is being— is a big one, and it's just a complex, jumbled collection that we've gotta, uh, really try to understand. So that's what we're trying to do in the Human Springome Project. It's really a hard thing to do. Uh, it is, uh, let me say on the outset that we think that an inaccurate answer to the half of the equation that tries to find out what people are doing is really making a lot of the, uh, theories, a lot of the advice that we give, a lot of the policies that we formulate, um, either incomplete, sometimes irrelevant, and often even wrong. So we've got to know what, what's going on. So that's what we're doing, um, in the Human Spreome Project. And let me just tell you how we're doing that. You'll get a sense of what a larger project is. We're asking you to participate in a piece of science at Stanford will pay you. And when we— when you decide to participate, we will put software on your laptop computer or your— and/or your smartphone that every 5 seconds that that device is turned on, it will take a screenshot of whatever you were looking at or whatever you were doing, and it will send it back to Stanford servers to be analyzed, mostly computationally, but to be analyzed by our project to find out what actually really are, are you doing. So, so far we've gotten about 200 million screenshots from about 1,000 people for up to a year. Uh, we're now registering, uh, onboarding people that are participating for a year. So this is a new form of huge big data, uh, that is, uh, about what people are actually doing. So there's much to say about the privacy and the data security and the software and how we do this, but sufficient to say right now that this is something that you're— a participation that you're involved in that requires no active engagement on your part other than signing up and getting the software loaded. You just generate the data as it's happening. So What do we see? So imagine you're a participant and we have your digital life for a year, every 5 seconds that one of your devices was turned on, and we're watching the movie of what your digital life looks like. So when we play it frame by frame, this is a— Nalani and I did this, the very first movie we made was in 2014, and we've been doing, you know, millions of these screenshots. Put in the— what we call them the screenome— as this is happening. What does the movie look like? You know, one thing I could say about the movie, if we did it for anybody or whoever's out there listening right now, is that the movie for your participation in this event already has probably got a lot of interruptions. There are probably a lot of other screens going on. Maybe somebody is watching CNN on the corner. There are a lot of self-imposed fragments that are just— that you're placing actively all around us. That's one thing to say about it. Whatever we're talking about with respect to the people that are in our research is true, I think, of all of us and what we're doing today. But here's some major pieces of that movie that we think are really important. First of all, it's extremely fragmented. And I mean, I don't mean fragmented in that you do something different every hour, every day, or season. I mean every moment, moment by moment. The average median amount of time you spend on any digital segment doing one thing before you switch and do something else is about 10 to 20 seconds. A lot of long— longer ones, but a whole lot of shorter ones as well. So lots of fragmentation. So that's something— this is radically different content being sandwiched together in any way you like because the interface and the content is all we can jumble it up however we want. So fragmentation, and these are short, short segments. If I'm not doing this, but if I was writing a book about our project, the title would be Short, and this is kind of radical combination of short things. A second thing to say, your screenome, your movie, your sequence of screens is very idiosyncratic compared to everybody else. This is hugely disappointing to social scientists who want 3 or 5 categories of people, but there's so much stuff because everything is digitized and the interfaces make it so possible for you to uniquely experience this world that what we're finding is that these, these records, these movies are very idiosyncratic. So that's a second— that, that's a second important thing. A third one, the content that we often talk about in distinct silos now becomes interdependent in these short segments. It is very difficult to talk about politics, stop, health, stop, purchases, stop, social relationships, stop. It is bang, bang, bang, bang. And any of these are radically different silos of information or even expertise of social scientists. Now, if that information is being put together into threads that are— that's anything that makes sense to us but may not make sense to anybody else. So this interdependence, this psychological blur— you can't talk about health in the COVID times without also talking about your relationships, your politics, your money. They're all together. So these threads of different content is very, very important. So just a few quick conclusion— or comments there about what we're finding in the data. So some conclusions that are informing our discussion about what's important, bad and good, about what's happening right now. One is, above all— it is not terribly researchy, but it is above all else screen time as the most predominant measure throughout the history of media psychology and media effects is not a good measure of what's happening right now. The difference between 3 and 4 hours of the stuff that we're doing right now may not be that important. It matters much more about the details. So screen time empirically does not turn out to be a great predictor. We need to move beyond screen time. It's not how much time, it's the details of whatever the heck you're doing. So, and these details are better matched with the concerns that we have. So if you want to talk about— John said he might want to talk about addiction to media, uh, you don't want to talk about being addicted to spending 3 or 4 hours, you want to talk about addicted to turning on the phone, seeing if you got a message back, and then turning it off. You know, that's probably more consistent with the dopamine rush associated with biological models of addiction. So the details matter. These happen in very short segments. Sequencing is really important. You can watch people's movie and you, you can see them going from a conversation with a child, uh, to a, a piece of work on a computer, to a video conference at work, to some pornography, to buying a t-shirt, to, you know, and all within seconds of each other. So sequencing, very important. We need to think about how we get out of these silos of information. So that we're not just political scientists or health scientists talking about our own domains, but really talking about these threats across domains. And then the last thing I'll say is that it's very difficult to talk about these effects without falling into, are they bad or good? And, um, we talk about whether they're bad or good, and especially the bad ones deserve a lot of conversations, but we're much more interested in talking about how powerful they are for bad and good and how they work in either case.
John Markoff: Thank you. Nilam, you're next.
Nilam Ram: Thanks, Byron. Thanks, Mary Ann, and thanks also to CASBS for— it's nice to be back at CASBS even though the view here is a little bit different than the view that we had from the, from the deck, but thanks for the inclusion up here as well. So I'm coming from a developmental psychology perspective the way that I'll present here. And also a methodological perspective. So lifespan developmental perspectives highlight that individuals' biology, psychology, and social development manifest at multiple levels of analysis. So that's everywhere from cells all the way up to society, and also at multiple time scales. And that's processes like Byron was talking about that happen on the milliseconds basis, and also processes that happen across millennia on an evolutionary basis, as Mary Ann was referencing as well. So our behavior changes over years and decades as we age and as we move through different life stages. So adolescents operate on their devices differently than adults operate on their devices. And also in our society, as our environment changes, the technology is changing as well. That's all influencing how it is that we develop and how it is that we act on an everyday basis. So our actions, thoughts, and feelings, and behaviors also change at very fast timescales. So one moment I'm in my email, one moment I'm on Zoom, one moment I'm making a meal. So all these activities are also happening very quickly. When we want to intervene, we're often intervening on those fast timescale processes with some hope that our interventions on the fast timescale processes will influence those long-term developmental processes. So behavior itself can be considered as a product of both the long-term processes, like technological change, and the short-term processes, like what I do on my smartphone right now, what that allows me to do. It allows me to make calls, to read news, to text my friends, to watch cat videos. Those are all included in my momentary behaviors, and those will differ in accordance with also those long-term processes. The adolescent is going to move through the information flow in a different way than an adult might move through that information flow. So there's good theory about how technology and innovation proceeds. Our colleagues will talk about that, I'm sure. There's good theory about lifespan development and how aging processes proceed. For instance, cognitive slowing, something that we might see in the way in which people operate on the devices. And there's also good theory about fast timescale behaviors, like how we regulate our emotions. Why is it that I'm switching from one activity on my smartphone to another activity? That could be in part to regulate my emotions. That email rejection that just came in, I might want to do something different in order to remove myself from that. That doesn't seem always like a bad thing. So how we search out information, how we respond to information, how we converse with each other on a turn-by-turn basis. They're all good theories about each of these different kinds of activities. Now, each of those theories, whether they're about technological innovations or whether they're about self-regulatory processes that are occurring on a moment-to-moment basis, explicitly or implicitly often imply that there's different time scales involved. There's a specific time scale on which technology influences people. There's a specific time scale on which emotions influence people. Whether or not that's stated explicitly is not always done in the way that the theories are presented, but perhaps it should be because it implies how it is that we should measure each of those different processes. Now the difficulty comes in that we've been trained in a way to do our measurement so that we isolate a single time scale. I measure on a monthly basis, or I measure on a yearly basis, or in the ScreenNow project we measure on a 5-second basis. So we implied that all of our study designs locate us at a particular time scale. That makes it much harder for us to talk about how it is that long time scales are influencing short time scales, or how short time scales are influencing long time scales. Now, when we've changed the scale at which we do analysis— so say the electron microscope came along, it changed everything that we knew about the way that the world was constructed. Genomics also changed what it is that we know about disease and health because it opened up a whole new way of conceptualizing problems and solutions. So similarly, our hope is to open up new ways of thinking about digital behavior by observing in this very fine detail what people are actually doing in their digital lives. And as psychologists, what they're doing— so as a psychologist, I'm interested in how that maps to larger sets of behavior. It's not just what's happening on the digital device, but those interpersonal relationships are also having an influence. I get to— grandparents get to talk to their grandkids in a way that they never did before because they can now co-locate in a virtual space. So what we're hoping is that this gives us some new understanding of both how the long-term processes, the technological cultural change that is influencing all of those short-term processes like information flow. And in particular, what Mary Ann is referencing too is how those short-term processes, information flow, memory, etc., are influencing the long-term processes. How is it that influencing long— or lifespan developmental process? So the idea is that somehow all of that is changing the way in which we are citizens of the world and how we're contributing to that particular world. Following on Byron's point, I want to underscore the view based upon what we see in the second-by-second use of the devices is that the individuals using these devices all have agency. So why is it that my screenome looks so different from your screenome? I don't have to read the words in the order in which the author who wrote the book 40 years ago intended that I read those words. And contemplate them. I can say, "Oh, I don't agree with that sentence. Let me go look something up on Google as a challenge to the way that that is." And I can do that in real time. So, the way in which we are moving through material might actually become more informative because I have agency in how it is that I want to move through that material. So, individuals get to choose what content they go through, how they move through that content, when they want to create content, and they're doing that in all very personal ways. So each of us sort of has the agency in order to be able to make heterogeneous displays of our behavior, and we're hoping that Screenomics opens up that heterogeneity for study. So thank you.
John Markoff: Thanks very much. Abby, the historian, for context.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Thank you very much. I do want to speak from a, a yet a more distant timescale, which is that of not of the species, but let's say certainly going back to the invention of the first memory technologies. I want to first thank CASBS and also thank in particular our co-sponsor, the Council on Library and Information Resources, which has been studying this area of what education sources in all media have been doing for a long time. So a lot of the things that I point out will be obvious to my colleagues in the library and archives world, but it's worth bringing into this conversation, I think. Speaking for the long term, I'm really definitely in the, you know, curb your enthusiasm and curb your alarm mode. So I want to try try to normalize some of the things that we're seeing that we're so desperately concerned about or irrationally optimistic about. So, you know, humans create tools, and like books and computers, and the tools we create in turn shape us. And we're in this kind of iteration. They modify our brain, and through us, they modify the environment we adapt to, for which we create more tools to manipulate more about that. So I'd say that the co-evolution of these tools and technologies and the human brain is iterative, it's contingent, and hence, I think, intrinsically unpredictable. Although I'm going to contradict myself already and say that there are some things which are quite predictable about technology changes, which is that what the inventors of these new technologies think they're doing is not at all what turns out to be the case. And I'm not just talking about unintended consequences. You know, one case in point obvious is when Johannes Gutenberg decided that he was going to invent movable type because he wanted to meet a market demand for cheaper Bibles. Nobody for— 70 years later, there were some Germans and Swiss who decided that they were going to domesticate this technology and forge a war against papacy. They were actually going to— you might say, this is Martin Luther and Zwingli and Calvin. They were going to, as we would say, disintermediate the relationship between God and the individual and get rid of the middleman, which is the Pope and the Catholic Church. And this was completely the opposite expectation, you might say, of what Gutenberg did. None of this was known at the time. None of this was known in Martin Luther's time. This is only something which is understood hundreds of years in retrospect by historians. So I want to urge a little humility and also some calm. We live in an unpredictable future, and that's just the way it is. On the second point I want to make is that the power of digital tools that we so often talk about I think actually have their origins in 19th century inventions of non-textual models and media, which is to say photography and the time-based media of recorded sound and moving image. I say that these technologies actually profoundly changed our sense of reality in the way that we take very little account of nowadays because they've been so normalized into the digital environment. But, you know, let's face it, the brain actually is designed you know, by happenstance or not, to take in most of our information through the visual cortex, not through text, which is kind of a made-up thing, and also through hearing. So I think the access to information really began with the proliferation of these images in the 19th century. They are more widely disseminated now, but I'd like to know what is the difference between absorbing all of these non-textual media through digital media rather than in physical forms. And this leads me to my third point, which is the profound epistemological shift that digital has brought upon us. That is, digital influences the way we think about thinking. I want to first point out that that epistemological shift has really impacted the library and archival world first, and very dramatically, and they've been extremely thoughtful about this. Because they are charged with actually stewarding the inherited knowledge of generations of millennia and passing it along intact, uncensored to the next generation. So we have always in libraries and archives preserved that information by preserving the physical formats upon which they are recorded. And that's also how information is classified. It's actually how we think about it. Oh, can I get that book, please? Oh, can I get that movie, please? And there were physical acts going to the theater, picking a book off of a shelf. That's not the way anymore, and libraries are really having a devil of a time trying to figure out these new epistemologies to understand how to categorize and organize knowledge. It's something that, you know, that Byron was talking about, how they're all basically integrated now into one single delivery system. And I'm really curious about how that affects the way we see things and think about it. You know, the computer really began to change the way our We thought about thinking when John von Neumann introduced the metaphor of the computer as a brain, or a brain as a computer, kind of logical processing. Within a couple of generations, this was superseded by neuroscientists saying, no, no, no, the brain is actually like a neural network. And now I think with the invention or development of artificial intelligence, we're looking again at how human intelligence works, because there are things that machines cannot replicate about human intelligence, not logical processing, but human intelligence, which I think again challenges us to think deeply about how we know and what we can know. And I want to leave with a final thought, which actually is a challenge to Mary Anne, to my other, other panelists, and also to the audience, which is that as Mary Anne says, that if reading a book work or a long text develops slower, time-demanding, deep reading skills that in turn facilitate inference, critical analysis, and empathy. What are the implications for democracy? I ask that because our democracy was created a long time ago, frankly, by a handful of white male property owners who were men of letters, deeply literate, but I wouldn't say that their literacy made them any better at inference than an illiterate hunter tracking prey in a forest, or especially more empathic to people who did not look like them. So the literacy, the joys of literacy, which supposedly spread from this view, this Enlightenment view that we are sort of endlessly perfectible human beings, is really, to my mind, an outmoded view of human nature. And I wonder if that actually poses challenges for democracy, because democracy is fundamentally based on those views of human nature and views of communicating, which are no longer current in the 21st century. And I think that's also something that we can track with research into the digital realm.
John Markoff: Thank you. Thank all of you. That was great. A good introduction. Let me start. I've got questions here from the audience, and I'll try to insert them. But I want to start by drilling down a little more deeply into the Screenome Project. And Byron, while you were talking, I realized that John McCarthy, a Stanford computer scientist who died in 2011, is actually the inventor of the timesharing or the multitasking operating system. Is he our villain or hero here? I know him as the father of AI, but I didn't think of him as the father of distraction.
Byron Reeves: Well, possibly, but I think it— I think what we've got are devices that finally are allowing us to do what we naturally would like to do, to do. It may not be the best thing for us to do, but as Marianne pointed out, but I think it's very natural to want to regulate moment by moment what's happening. I might want to go from something particularly negative to something positive. I might want to consume a little and then produce a little, all on these short timescales. So I think that what we've got are devices that are— and I don't think we're done yet at all. I think we've got a ways to go. That really allow us to do what the brain was— and our bodies were actually built to do— in terms competitively in social environments. So I'm not sure I'd blame it on him, um, but, um, a little bit. It's, it's certainly an affordance that makes it more possible to do more different things that I choose.
John Markoff: Let me ask you about the, the instrumentation that you guys have done. You know, as you were talking, I was looking around my room room, and I've counted 7 screens without even really turning around in my room. And so, are you instrumenting all 7, or are you working on 1 and only capturing 1/7 of what I do?
Byron Reeves: For you, we're probably only capturing 1/7, or maybe 2/7, because we'll hit 2 of your screens, and give us a little time, and we'll hit your cable television, but you're probably not counting that as a, you know, as a screen. Interestingly, there is very little 2-screen digital life. We talk about that a lot. A lot of commercial folks are very interested in competitive screens and using your smartphone while you're watching a football game and whatnot, but that doesn't seem to be happening all that much. So we're, you know, everything is getting funneled through fewer and fewer screens. We used to have 7, 10 routinely, and they were all devoted to certain functions, but pretty much everything is coming through that laptop and smartphone. When Stanford students are allowed in the dorms, there's not a television in the dorms. It's all on those computer screens and increasingly smartphones.
John Markoff: And in terms of looking at your data, did you notice a significant or systemic change with pandemic and lockdown? Could you see that in your data?
Byron Reeves: What do we say, Nilam? We've gone to great lengths to be able to answer your questions soon. We are— we have a couple hundred people, uh, that we— that are signed up for a year that are, uh, where the research is oriented specifically to COVID times, and especially with respect to, uh, fortnightly or periodic health inventories and diagnostic questions that we talked about.
John Markoff: And actually, just in what little hint you gave us, the first thing that was striking to me is your focus on fragmentation. Um, I didn't expect that either. I would have thought there would have been, for example, a category, category of gamer, a large category of gamer where they would stay wed to the screen for a long time. Is that not true?
Byron Reeves: No, no, it's, it's, it's really not the case. People are just, uh, it's very, very hard to categorize a theme, uh, you know, over time. The fragmentation is that— so in, in 2014, and when we were at CASBS, Nalani and I went down to the engineering school, put up thousands and thousands of screens on this big high definition, a bunch of walls over there, and we started looking at the data without using the LOMS, uh, magical, uh, quantitative skills, just looking at it. You just look at it and it's just, oh, you know, that there was, uh, 20 seconds of that movie and then 10 seconds of this purchase and then checking out, uh, a Facebook post to see if there was a new— you know, it's just this very, very quick changing, and you had to get into the psychology of that quickly.
John Markoff: Is that kind of multitasking behavior— well, so two questions. First of all, do you see anything by type of screen? Um, do people tend to do X on one screen and Y on another screen?
Nilam Ram: I think that there is some indication of that, but my hunch is that it's also diminishing as the power capabilities of our smartphones gain that we get to do more things on our smartphone. So 10 years ago, things that we only saw on laptops are now we're also seeing on smartphones. That's very clear, those long-term trends. On the moment-to-moment basis, I think that there was one— that we have one analysis that indicates basically phone calls are happening on the smartphone and not on the laptop screen, but those sort of device-specific, uh, things. Yeah.
John Markoff: So I was going to ask you, Mary Ann, next, what has happened to attention span since the emergence of digital technology?
Maryanne Wolf: Oh, goodness. This is one of the really interesting questions. Actually, Linda Stone began this years ago with her beautiful phrase that we all repeat still. Linda, if you're listening. And that's the idea of continuous partial attention. And there's no question that there are various research bases that shows that our attention has changed dramatically. As has our memory itself. And I think one of the most interesting connections between what I've begun to read in Abby's work and mine is that the nature of the quality of attention has effects on the consolidation in memory. And of course, we're, we're going to be talking about memory in various ways. But this, especially with children, is a particular worrisome aspect, which we see in databases. And I'll just recite— recite— I'll just describe one quick database for all of you to think about. One of the most important aspects in reading is what you comprehend, what you retain, what you have understood. Well, when we analyze— and the European eRead Network has done this beautifully under Delgado and Salmorán— when you analyze 20, almost 20 years of studies of just looking at what you, what you comprehend, what you retain, what your attention is like on the same story, digital versus print, you find that there is a superiority effect for print for comprehension. Then the question becomes, what about our most recent students? These are all young adults, high schoolers, college. You see that the superiority for effect for print actually increases the more they are a digital native, which goes back to your question, John. They believe that when they are attending to various things all the time, they are able to retain and remember, and they are not. The sequencing is off, which is, I believe, interestingly connected to broader points that Byron and, and Neil are studying. But the sequence is off. The comprehension is different. And they believe the very converse, that they are better on the screen because they read faster. So we have this really interesting— going back to Nilam— that interesting relationship between the millisecond and what happens later in, in the more cognitively demanding processes.
John Markoff: Just one follow-up question. Is there any data on what might have happened to IQ in the face of technologies that distract?
Maryanne Wolf: Oh, you know, I so didn't want you to ask me that question. You know, one of the beauties and one of the difficulties is that there are mixed databases right now that I am suffering through. And I think, I think I wish I had heard the end of what you said, Abby, but you may have said that, but we are in such a frontier. We're in such a hinge moment. But the hope is that the data we have— and this goes back actually to Nicholas of Cusa, even before Gutenberg— that the data we have provide us knowledge bases that we have to eventually pull together. So John, I don't want to answer your question right now because it's conflicting. But these are all things that are part of what Nicholas of Cusa said. When we have contradictory proofs or truths, we must have learned ignorance. And that's the stance I believe we have to have, learned ignorance. We're pulling these databases together. And of course, when I hear about the Screenome, oh my goodness, what an extraordinary, complex set of databases you're dealing with. Makes mine feel much simpler. Thank you.
John Markoff: Abby, for context, you know, so the personal computer emerged in '75, multitasking operating systems probably in the mid-'80s, the smartphone in 2007. In Silicon Valley, we would like to talk about internet time, and, you know, we used to like to talk about things getting not just faster, but faster, faster at exponential rates, and that maybe changed in 2015. But could you say something about pace of change? You have a long view that goes back to Gutenberg.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, and before. I mean, it's very hard to know, to get a sense, because we only know about— we only have— we only know as much as we have evidence for, and the people about whom we have evidence are a very small number of people who actually lived. So I want to keep that in mind, but there's every reason to believe that whatever time frame people lived in, whatever period they lived in, they felt that there was something very special about their time, Very often they fell into apocalyptic thinking because they anticipated something terrible. Remember, they didn't even have a sense of whether the Earth moved around the sun or the sun around the moon. So, I mean, they had a very different cosmology. And I think they had a very different sense of time. They had a much shorter lifespan. Everybody expected that most people would die the age of, I don't know, 5, 6, 8, 10. And yet we also know that people lived to the age of 92 or 95. So it very much depended. And I'm not sure— You know, the sense of time is so subjective, John, that I'm really not sure that my own experience of COVID time, let's say, the pause, aren't we all sort of confused when our— because our patterns and our habits that we don't think about very much suddenly became disrupted and our sense of time became quite disrupted. And I think that's very much the case. I think the sense of time also depends, you know, as Nilan was saying, so intensely upon how long we've lived and what period of life we're in. So, I'd say that subjectively, there's no reason to believe that things are actually accelerating. But the one thing that seems to be really different about now and previous technological revolutions is not that— or communication revolutions— is not that everyone felt that time was accelerated and they were in a flood of information. Regularly reported, no matter how slow the technology is by our standards, it's an accompanying sense of anxiety and dread about what might be happening. Because we know what's being lost, we have no idea what's being gained. And I think that that's what we're going through now. But I mean, that's a long answer to your question. The short answer is no, I think people always felt that time was passing too fast.
John Markoff: Byron and Neelam, do you have thoughts on pace of change from your collection of data over the last decade or so?
Nilam Ram: Yeah, what I would want to pick up on something Byron had mentioned in response to your note about addiction, and that one of the classic ideas in addiction is that we would see a bimodal distribution. We would see the normal population all sort of clustered together, and then we would see addicted individuals very far out in the distribution. We don't see this at all in our data, especially at the within-person level. It's all just all lognormally distributed, how often it is that we're switching and everything else, and that gives us some confidence that the technology is sort of catching up to what it is that the brain was designed to do. And so the reason why we're switching among all of these different activities is that That's what we were built to do in an environment that was potentially had lots of threats in it. I need to pay attention to all of those different threats. So there's a reason why I don't sit and do one thing for a very long time. My brain was built to do something different.
Byron Reeves: No, no, Lon, you should tell the story about driving through Nevada to get to California a couple of months ago.
Nilam Ram: Yeah, so driving through this, this, uh, huge expansive space, I had the notion in driving through there that time is just completely different in that environment where it's okay to do it tomorrow because the world is going to look exactly the same, the dust is going to blow in the same way each day, and that really is different from living in metropolitan areas where things are moving very quickly and there's lots of stuff to pay attention to.
Byron Reeves: Sort of gave a space that was useful You know, one thing to add to the acceleration issue, which is a great one, and historically I know this from discussions with colleagues, is not only fast or slow, but the rhythm of life and the rhythm of these experiences. So there is very much a digital rhythm of, especially on a smartphone, of da-da-da, you know, spending a little time and then change, change, change, switch with— so you you get these kind of syncopation that becomes similar to how films are cut and edited. And so it's not only the pace, but you get a structure of thinking and experience.
Abby Smith Rumsey: But I will say that that was also something that's widely reported among, you know, people working in factories in the mid-19th century, where that kind of industrial production unit really sent changed people's sense of time, and of course it completely changed their bodies. So they started to have these kind of repetitive, repetitive motion injuries, which also affected their understanding of time passing. And so, you know, working a 14-hour day seemed like it was very, very short all the time, and yet virtually exhausting. I mean, there's a lot of literature about that.
Maryanne Wolf: I'd like to make a slightly different point. Point, and it actually goes back to Aristotle. And he was talking about time and life and the good life, the good society. And one of the things that he said that I think I always think about in cognition is that there's the life of productivity, activity, and entertainment. But then for the good society, and I would say for the good reader, for the good thinker, there has to be time for the contemplative mode. And my worry about living in an age of distraction, a landscape of distraction, which, just as Nilam said, is genetically wired for us to have a novelty reflex and always move our attention to what is novel, we are giving less time to that reflective contemplative aspect of, of human processing. And that, that version of time, if you will, I think is really important for us to think about as we deal with this dilemma in front of us.
John Markoff: Yeah, Byron.
Byron Reeves: Let me just say something about, uh, uh, Maryanne's comment about partial attention and this notion of distraction and interruption as being a major feature of media. And I, I think it is, I think it's absolutely important, but there is a sense in which the switching that's happening now, the fragmentation, the fast pace, is self-induced. And it's not only an attractive nuisance that's out there and I'm going to grab for the next shiny thing, but I have a stream of goals and motivations and emotion regulation and things that are happening to me, and now I can do something about it actively as a processor of this information. So when we talk about partial attention to— John, one— a news story that you write that takes 15 minutes to read and another 5 minutes to contemplate about, it's going to get chunked up and it's going to suffer the actual contemplation, the memory the evaluation of that news story is going to suffer, but it's not replaced totally with junk. It's replaced with my ability to make my own story. I'm making my own consciousness. I'm following my own threads, and sometimes purposefully and actively, sometimes kind of accidentally, but it feels good to me. So it's my thread, my story, instead of your story, and that's true for a commercial a movie— movies are never watched from start to finish now, you know, or in almost any unit of media experience that you can imagine.
John Markoff: Well, let me connect that question to the earlier question about the fate of democracy, because, you know, in the 1980s Nicholas Negroponte at the Media Lab got a lot of attention for this notion called the Daily Me, um, you know, a news source that was just yours. And now we're obviously there, and coupled in some way to this notion of, well, I'm thinking about individual fragmentation.
Byron Reeves: We all have our own newspaper.
John Markoff: Could you guys talk about what the fact that there's no longer a single or even a set of narratives, but that there's this multiplicity of narratives, and what does that mean for democracy?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Well, I will say, you know, historically we've always told ourselves, and I mean we being, you know, the sort of white, educated, intelligent, rich Democrats, as opposed to the majority of people in the United States, but we've always told ourselves that we have a shared past. And by having a shared past, we also have a shared future, because it is the past that actually creates these expectations of what is going to happen to us. You know, now the challenge is that there are a lot more people of different origins in the United States, and they are all now saying that they have their own, you know, they're recovering their past, not just the white man's past, but a multiplicity of pasts. And I think that that's— the question you're getting at, John, is really rooted in this idea of having to have a shared past. You're talking about an information feed today, but I think what we understand about whatever we're reading today is always conditioned by what we understand based on our set of expectations based on the past that we imagine for ourselves. And I think one of the fragmentations we're having is we do not agree that we actually have the same history anymore.
Nilam Ram: I was going to make a similar point about— it resonated with Abby's notion of the people who set the rules about what democracy is. That's a long time ago and a very select class of people. And Byron talked about how it is that the ScreenNow project is adjusting one side of the equation, and perhaps the way in which we're judging people and their activities is based on an old system. We don't actually do that anymore. That was the wrong measurement system. So I can imagine something like reading comprehension being the case that if I'm a student who has lots of variety of thoughts while it is that I'm reading something, we just didn't have a way to measure that before. We didn't get to see that while I was reading, I was actually thinking about 7 other different things, including what the grocery list was. But now we get to see it in real time on people's devices as they do that.
Maryanne Wolf: My question about that, Milan, and it goes to all of us, is that it's one thing to talk about our personal narrative or our agency. It's another when it is externally distraction-oriented. In other words, we are becoming not— our agency is changing. So I look at both, both the negative and the positive of this whole concept of distraction and what, you know, the people who are very cognizant of what, what intermittent reinforcement means in distraction and how that really changes comprehension. It changes attention. It changes our own narrative. And my hope is that we can learn enough so that we have control. We do have agency over the variety of things that happen and that they aren't being fed to us.
John Markoff: Let me bring in the audience. We have a bunch of audience questions. Um, this one is directed at Nilam first, but other people jump in. Um, this is from Jim Kuhn. Uh, Nilam, although we all have agency, isn't it— isn't always the case that we are all self-aware of either that agency or the implications of specific ways we deploy it? In what ways can your study help teach us to be reflective about and ideally more self-aware about what we actually do and what we can do instead.
Nilam Ram: Yeah, so this is an interesting thing about— we weren't— I don't think that we realized the sense of the, the ways in which people are expressing their agency until we actually got the data and were able to see people switching on this 10 to 15 second basis. So I sort of take that question as leading us towards, and then what are we going to do about the way that people are doing their agency? Making them self-aware of it. We've talked a long time about having a closed-loop system where now that we can collect the data, that we could provide in essence a dashboard back that would allow people to reflect on the ways in which it is that they are consuming information, moving through information, producing information, and that that might just— that's the first step. The next would be to design some interventions that would help them optimize maximize their particular goals for how it is that they're expressing their agency.
John Markoff: This is from Dan Hoffman. I'd like to hear the panelists speak to the implications of all of this in our education systems.
Maryanne Wolf: I guess I will begin by saying it's such an extraordinary moment in time when we are both able to use technology in some ways at its best, and yet are confronted by the very inequities that all of us have in some way talked about. There is even in California, 67% of, of our children are not receiving adequate connectivity. And so if we look city after city, so we both have the promise of how technology can help us, but we have also seen already the amazing problems in regression that are happening because not just of the connectivity problems, but the nature of the difference between having a human relationship in the teaching of, of a content area and the digital one. So we have many questions that are going on, but there is no question that we have in many of our children at least 10 months of regression that's going on. So I look at digital as both something that has helped us tremendously in this hinge moment and also has unique impediments to learning that we need to take very seriously as we move forward. We can make misses in believing that the digital answer is here. It is not. So, but we have much to learn.
John Markoff: You know, a couple of years ago, it was a psychologist whose name is Jean Twenge who wrote an article for The Atlantic, and she also wrote a book basically arguing that screens culture had a series of effects on a generation she referred to as iGen that have been deleterious just as a whole. Do you guys disagree with her general conclusions that we've created a generation that is less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy, and unprepared for adulthood? It was a pretty bleak view of these technologies. What's, what's the general consensus?
Abby Smith Rumsey: I'm always wary. I mean, I, you know, it's an old study and I'm suspicious of it to begin with because I don't like single explanations for what's wrong with an entire generation. And I think it's very particular. I think everybody is particular. I think that the technology itself is very seldom anything other than a reflection of the way children are taught to use it. So I think now we're talking again about education. I think that we need to be more reflective about the goals of education and I mean, I remember the same conversation when I was growing up and I was told that my brain was going to rot because I was going to watch TV. And so, I was not allowed to watch TV. And all it did was made me out of adjustment with other people my age. So, I think, you know, it's very difficult to judge these things from one generation to another because what matters is how that child really fits in with their own cohort. And I think sometimes it's very difficult for Dutch adults to understand and get into the minds of young, particularly tweens, as they start to form their own cohorts through these technologies.
Nilam Ram: Yeah, I'll underscore what Abby was talking about in that the, the developmental sequence which we expect from people has adolescence in it, and adolescence is characterized by a time of doing something different or exploring a variety of different activities. And I think that Part of what might be— the ways in which one can explore now are different. So the combination of the technology which is available and the opportunities that one has opens up a wide variety of things. And I would say that rather than jumping to a single conclusion, our data suggests that there's so much heterogeneity that everybody's progression is totally different. That that's probably not just a single root explanation cause or one single trajectory. Everybody's on different trajectories.
Byron Reeves: I think there's a research investment implication from some of the critiques of that kind of generational changes as well, and the Lama is particularly well-versed at this— in this. But we think it's much more important to make an investment in research that follows a single person over multiple time points, every 5 seconds or days or seasons or even years. Much more important to do that than it is to look cross-sectionally at a group of people at this one point in time. So our interest is spending the money, spending the degrees of freedom, the collection of data on following that one person because everybody does pretty much everything now. On, you know, online. So it's, it's much more important the sequence in which it happens and what you do before and after it and how it influences what you're doing. So the— and we even talk about, um, somewhat tongue-in-cheek but not totally, n=1 studies or research. One person, millions of data points may be a better investment if it's the same amount of time and money than a million people in one at one point in time.
Maryanne Wolf: May I suggest, in addition, not as a binary, but in addition, Byron, some of these large meta-analyses, for example, the one that I discussed has 171,000 subjects in it. When you see strong data that suggests there are things amiss in the way digital is being used to comprehend information which has a direct effect on critical analysis, we have to take that with seriousness. So I believe it's not excluding you. In fact, I can't wait to learn more about what you're doing. But I think some of these large meta-analyses and then the sub-analyses that come from them are giving us really interesting quantitative and qualitative looks. And how I'm going to use Abby again, and that's going back to the Assyrians and the Sumerians. The Assyrians, when they were devising their new writing systems, didn't throw out the Sumerians. They kept them there and they learned what was best about that system as over 1,000 years they developed their own. Well, I want to suggest that we can learn so much about what we have become— for me, of course, it's neuroscience, studying the reading brain circuit with print, but also learning how what is changing as a way to redress the weaknesses of the new system, but not to throw either away, but to learn from both as we move forward. Evolution makes misses when knowledge is not there. And so I want this concept of multiple frames of knowledge being used to help us move forward.
John Markoff: That's an interesting perspective. I want to ask a follow-up based on that. I've been mulling what TikTok means from a social scientist's point of view. And so I was just thinking about, we moved from Instagram to TikTok. As a medium, Byron, or any of you, do you have an understanding of TikTok? How do you, how do you frame it? What does it mean in the world?
Byron Reeves: We try to look at features of media that really cut across commercial products. So it's, it's, it's got words and pictures, and it moves in a particular rhythm and there's a, you know, a traditional kind of content. So, I don't, I wouldn't make too much different of that other than by custom what kind of content is put into these features. But I want to play politician in a debate and respond to Marianne's comment about meta-analyses. As someone who zooms out on media effects, there are as many or more are, in my view, meta-analyses that show substantially zero relationship between media use, especially as measured by screen time, an important criteria that we're concerned about. Not all of them, and reading and language, and that may be an exception, but especially right now in the area of well-being and anxiety and depression and mental health, the meta-analyses are are uniformly disappointing with respect to matching the concerns that people are voicing about the content.
John Markoff: Here's a question from a perspective that I don't think we've really addressed yet. This is from Mike Rohrbach. Would any of you consider the generational differences in perception, absorbing, and incorporating digital information, and active participation in learning? What about generational differences?
Maryanne Wolf: Well, if no one's going to say anything, I will just at least say that the generation who was closest to the digital native was showing a different effect in the processing cognitively than the ones before. So there was a generational difference, but it was the opposite direction of what we thought. The children who were most digitally, if you will, native, were in fact thinking that the speed of processing on the screen was making them more able to be intelligent purveyors of of information, and they were simply wrong. But it was interesting that there was a generational difference there.
Nilam Ram: One thing which I've noted— we've done quite a few cohort studies trying to look at the differences across cohorts and a variety of well-being outcomes, particularly in old age. And one of the things that we struggle with in that research is the concept of measurement invariance. So is my outcome measure even the same outcome measure for two different cohorts. And perhaps maybe that's not the kind of research which is useful. We should be adapting our outcome measures and measuring the outcomes in different ways, in the same way that we're measuring the independent variables in different ways in the different cohorts.
Maryanne Wolf: Can I just suggest very quickly, because I don't want to talk more than I have already, I would like to have a different tack on this question of generation. I think our research should be really looking at what is best in different epochs developmentally. And Neelam, I'm looking very closely at you right now. In other words, what do we do between 0 and 5, between 5 and 10, between 10 and 15, for young adults? How do we, if you will, make our knowledge more specific to developmental aspects of those generations, if you will? So I would like to take that question slightly differently than the questionnaire gave it.
Nilam Ram: Yeah, I think it's the same question, though. It's like, should we be measuring 5- to 10-year-olds in the same way we should be measuring 10- to 15-year-olds? And also, we should be considering that the 5- to 10-year-olds are going into a different world than the 10- to 15-year-olds went in. So if reading is moving into a digital format and students who are not good at reading in the digital format are going to perform worse in school later on because they're not reading in a digital format, perhaps we should encourage them to read in a digital format.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Right.
Maryanne Wolf: I completely agree, Neelam, and that's why I tried to talk about a biliterate brain where almost like Vygotsky, we have parallel tracks of learning digital cognitive linguistic social skills and we have print-based skills, and then between 10 and 15, we are bringing them together. I mean, that's a proposal based on research, but I agree with you. And I'm not going to say another word.
John Markoff: Don't go away, Mary Ann. So here's a question from Faye Lomax Cook. I have heard a lot about how all these amazing technological developments are changing our brain circuits, our attention spans, our ability read and study deeply, but what I do not understand is how. What's the process? If one looks back in time, historically doomsayers worried about every new technological breakthrough was harmful. Were they really? I hope this seminar can provide some hard data on these issues. Well, does anybody have insight on what's at work here in interactive technologies? What's the how?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Oh, shoot.
Maryanne Wolf: If I have to, I will speak again with one tiny little sentence. Study. All right, this is really fast, and I promise not to talk anymore. So if we look at just between 0 and 5, and we look at how children are processing through brain imaging— this is the work from basically pediatric neurologists who do imaging— you see that the language regions— and this is responding to the how— the language regions of the young child's brain when exposed to print, when exposed to caretakers who are reading, are more activated than those who are listening to that story in an audio version versus seeing it bells and whistles on a screen that's, you know, giving everything to them. So we actually see differences in the activation of those regions of the brain that are working for expressive and receptive language. So that's one small study, and it's one of many in which we're really trying to make a mosaic of knowledge bases about how all this comes together and what influences what when.
Abby Smith Rumsey: You know, there's also— I'm not speaking as a neurologist, so forgive me— but it's also pretty clear that the how we incorporate information, how we recall it, how we even store it in our brain, it's all tied to a spatialization of brain. And this, I think, is the real thing that we're missing about the fact that we don't have physical formats holding information, or it's all just one format, which is a smart— the smartphone. Because people really remember where something is on a page. I mean, they really do remember where something is on a page, or they can walk to a bookshelf and say, well, I know that's in this quadrant of the bookshelf. Because in fact, the memory actually is spatialized in a kind of literal sense. And one of the things that's tricky about reading, particularly scrolling reading, is that there is not— there aren't those quadrants of things so that, you know, I was just talking to a student who has the same book on her iPhone and on the bookshelf, and she finds that reading and thinking about the book is easier in print. When she has to find a specific passage, if she remembers the words, she can scroll and find it on the phone, but otherwise she actually finds it easier to leaf through the book because she has some memory of where the information is spatially. Now, I don't know how, you know, how that really can explain— I mean, I don't know the brain mechanism of it, but it's pretty clear that information, particularly memory recall, is very specialized. And that, I think, may be threatened by everything arriving on one particular screen.
Byron Reeves: Let me add something to your question about these particular commercial products that you're— whether it's TikTok or Instagram or something new pops up or a new, a new device. These are all commercially defined. They're businesses, they're collections of ways to present information. And one thing that would be useful in public discussion about media effects, I think, is to go beyond the commercial container of all these psychological features that actually might cause these changes. And talk about the elements of them. So, for example, to talk about the effects of Facebook seems almost ridiculous to us because Facebook can, of course, be watching politics, connecting with friends, stalking an ex-lover, going to a video conference at work. It can be all the— it can be pictures, it can be words, it can be fast-paced. Slow-paced. So one of the things that would really help a lot, I think, in the public discussion of this is to really try to get into the features of these commercial products that actually cause the effects that we're interested in. Ours are pretty much psychological, but they could be cultural as well. So go beyond these buckets of commercial features.
Nilam Ram: There I would add on the other side the plasticity of the brain is an important part of the way in which we adapt to environments. We're all born into different environments, and our brains allow us to adapt to those particular environments that we're in. And it doesn't seem necessary to constrain the plasticity of that ability to match to the particular environment in which we are being raised and the stimuli which we're being exposed to, because our individual survival depends on that plasticity.
John Markoff: We've talked about cognition, but I want to ask about social interaction. I guess it's been 20 years since Norman Nye, who was a political scientist at Stanford, released this study of basically making the argument that the rise of computer networks was meaning— meant less face-to-face interaction. Then it touched off this big controversy over the value of virtual communities and stuff like that. But his point was that just like with television, when we're focusing on a screen, we're not focusing on face-to-face interaction. Now, of course, we have our computers in our hands, and so we can walk around with them. What can be said about the loss of face-to-face interaction in the rise of these new technologies, if anything?
Abby Smith Rumsey: It's funny because I was thinking now that we can't travel that actually I have a lot more virtual face time with people because I don't— and I don't have to get on a plane to go see people. People, that in fact it's much easier to spend time with people even if it's, you know, on a screen like this, which is, you know, unusual. But, you know, we get used to it, right, Nilam? We get used to it pretty quickly. So I doubt the premise, frankly.
Nilam Ram: Yeah, and I would add into that, that it would be the case that in an interpersonal interaction was one of these silos that Byron was mentioning. It's an activity that was classified as being existing in this space. And when I was doing that, I was not doing something else. And now in the digital environment, it's all interspersed with each other. We're having those interpersonal interactions spread throughout our day, throughout our workday, throughout dinnertime, et cetera, et cetera. So the interpersonal interactions have become distributed temporally in a different way than they were before.
Maryanne Wolf: I guess I would add, and Nilam, you and I probably both shared some of these textbooks on touch for infancy and early childhood, but touch is very important, and the ability to have a child under the crook of an arm and have interaction that is literally so closely involved in just the, the connection of attention that is so much different when it's interpersonal than when it's with a digital. I would, I would say that even though I'm happy that we can adapt, and I would see that as complementary possibilities for communication, we would be remiss not to realize how important touch, very, very close interaction between child and parent is in the development of our species.
John Markoff: So we're coming up on 3:20. I'll take the moderator's I want to take a little bit of license and ask you to speculate on the future to end our afternoon. So we've gone from desktop computing to laptop computing to computing in the palm of our hands, but there are half a dozen companies at least in Silicon Valley who are now working on some kind of brain-computer interface. Elon Musk wants to drive a spike into your brain— that seems pretty, you know, disconcerting to me, but there are others. These connect— these technologies are not entirely in the realm of science fiction any longer. What would the consequences, do you think, be of moving to a new kind of interface?
Nilam Ram: I'll take the easy answer, which is I think that the ones which will be successful are the ones that match together with the way it is that we are actually normally operating. So the ones that somehow feel foreign to us are not going to be the ones that succeed, and the ones that do somehow match our proclivities as humans, those will be the ones that are successful.
Byron Reeves: Yeah, I'd add to that, I'd say more fragmentation, uh, more fragmentation at my discretion and following paths that I find interesting, you know, either unconsciously or purposely, uh, more idiosyncrasy, more uniqueness and personalized, more ability to manage things in my life. If I'm feeling down, to get up. If I'm feeling up, to get— to be calm, whatever. So I see a lot of the same trajectories. I'm not optimistic that in 5 or 10 years we'll all be dealing with neural interfaces. Having spent a lot of my career hanging around folks that are working on that, I think that might be distant, but I like Nalum's comment about following the same trajectories of changes that we're on now. I think that's, that's where we're headed.
Maryanne Wolf: I guess I would like to suggest, and I'll never forget the first time I read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near and came with the realization that in 40 years many of us will have access to— I can't remember the exact figure that he used, exponential knowledge that will be at our fingertips. I guess what I would like to think about always is the ability to preserve what we know is best about being a human being, and that is akin to what Nilam is saying, as we expand, and that if we expand at the cost of loss of what we know is most important to being a contemplative, critically analytic, empathetic empathic human being, then I would suggest that we evaluate with great ethical care that expansion. So each of them would, would have an examination process, I hope, by us trying to be our wisest selves.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, I would, I would echo Neil Lom's thought that the ones that are going to be assimilated the soonest and the best are the ones that actually fill in for deficits and things we want to do. No one thinks twice about getting a hip replacement now, or, or laser surgery for your eyes, or even wearing contact lens or glasses. So I think that if we think about them as prosthetics that help us overcome some of our disabilities or give us added normal traits, then I think that's— that looks like a very promising future. If we, if we envision the future just as cyborgs and brains taking over our our human abilities, then I think we're in the realm of speculative dystopic fiction.
John Markoff: A perfect note to end on. Thank you, Abbie, and big thanks to everyone on today's panel for this conversation. So I'd like to thank today's co-sponsors, Bloomberg Beta, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Human Screen-On Project here at Stanford. And so heads up, the new calendar year, CASBS has many more episodes in the series. Social Science in the World in Crisis coming your way. So thank you again to our panel, and thanks to everyone for showing up and joining us today.
Narrator: That was Nilam Ram, Byron Reeves, Abby Smith Rumsey, Marianne Wolff, and John Markoff discussing the digital dilemma in the time of COVID You can learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by visiting the CASBS CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed, and of course, more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at the center. So be sure you're subscribed in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.