Screening Out Distractions

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.” It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way. No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention.

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts.

This approach may allow for the best economization of time—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore? Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat.

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Café, without the lattes.


Anita J Joseph ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.