Lenny Gonzales

The onslaught of information from the wired world can be overwhelming to anyone — even the savviest online audiences. But rather than completely shut out the digital world, the smarter solution is to learn how to manage it, says author Howard Rheingold.

In his book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold outlines the potential merits of the vast digital landscape, and offers ideas on how to lasso the unwieldy aspects and use it for good.

In a recent conversation on the Forum talk program, Rheingold stresses the importance of intention when it comes to managing digital noise. Knowing that every click will likely to lead to a chunk of time spent on what follows will help people decide if that’s worthwhile. Every click counts.

“I think [there's] this matter of meta-cognition, of knowing where you’re putting your attention,” he told Michael Krasny on Forum. “You need to make decisions. ‘Am I going to click on that link? Am I going to maybe open a tab for it on my browser and look at it later? Am I going to bookmark it to look at it much later or am I going to ignore it?’ You need to make those decisions consciously and I think most of us make them unconsciously… We wouldn’t have so many cute cat videos if people didn’t click on impulse.”

Rheingold advises all of us to create a specific plan when we’re online, and to follow through.

“You have to make [decisions] in the context of what you intend to get done for the day. Write down, with good old right-brain pencil and paper, three things you want to get done [online] today, and just two or three words each, and put that in the periphery of your vision,” he said. “And when your gaze falls upon it, simply ask yourself ‘Is what I’m doing now going to get me to where I need to be by the end of the day?’ I’m not asking you to admonish yourself or to make any changes to your routine, I’m only asking you to add a little layer of awareness.”

This exercise in self-control can be honed over time with tools like meditation, Rheingold writes in a chapter called “Attention!”

“Mindfuless in all its forms and applications certainly is an end in itself, but practicing mindfulness in regard to online attention serves a specific strategic goal,” he writes. “Your goal and mine in this context is not just the control but also the management of attention.”

Rheingold is not alone in his ideas about how meditation can help focus attention when online. Researcher David Levy recently provided evidence on how learning how to meditate can train the mind to focus. (Read How Meditating Helps With Multitasking). In his study, Levy said those who learned how to meditate were able to keep on task better than those who didn’t. “They realized they didn’t have to respond to everything right away, not everything is urgent,” Levy said. “They felt more in control, less tense, less afraid.”

GUIDING KIDS ONLINE BEHAVIOR

As the digital landscape continues to shift under our feet, it’s that much more important for parents to be aware of the subtleties of having an online identity and life. Though the media portrays the Web as a “den of frivolity,” Rheingold writes that it also presents an appropriate place for young people to experiment with their identity. “What they are learning is not altogether detrimental to themselves and the society they are going to build when they come of age,” he writes.

At the same time, kids needs to be aware that their online lives will leave indefinite footprints.

“Kids need to be told before they get online that nowadays everything that you put online is going to be there forever, it’s going to be searchable, it can be connected to your name, it can be reproduced, and it can be spread around the world,” he said. “Kids have always done dumb things and they’ve always kind of said snarky things about each other and they’ve always had their best friends. They’ve never had them reproduced forever, search-ibly and reproduce-ibly and able to be broadcast everywhere. You need to know some of these things before you dip your toe in.”

And though the media is rife with stories of online bullying — with good reason, as it is a common phenomenon — the development of audio and video chats like Skype and FaceTime on Apple devices may help to ameliorate online attacks.

“There’s something about face to face that can’t be duplicated online. But a great deal of that signaling can be duplicated with audio and video,” Rheingold said. “So I think we’re getting a richer form of communication than we used to have. Here’s a research question for some sociologist: Are people going to flame each other when we have universal audio and video or is that an artifact of the text-only world?”

- Additional reporting by Amanda Stupi

Flickr: ssoosay

By Aran Levasseur

Think of sitting quietly in a spartan room. There are no TVs, computers, smartphones, books, magazines or music. If you’re like most people, this probably sounds like a recipe for boredom. In our culture, we avoid moments of “not-doing” because we don’t associate boredom with having any value. And our aversion to boredom and not-doing have been amplified in our hyper-connected age.

It’s been said that the currency of the Net is attention. As connectivity penetrates the furthest reaches of our lives, all of us, but schools in particular, need to treat attention as a skill to be cultivated.

A torrent of stimulation is just a click or touchscreen away, ensuring that even the slightest trace of boredom can be mitigated through constant screen connectivity. As beneficial as this perpetual connectivity can be, neuroscience has been uncovering some detrimental side effects.

Recent brain imaging studies reveal that sections of our brains are highly active during down time. This has led scientists to imply that moments of not-doing are critical for connecting and synthesizing new information, ideas and experiences. Dr. Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School put it this way in a 2010 New York Times article: “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body.”

According to a report from the University of California, San Diego, in 28 years — from 1980 to 2008 — our consumption of information increased 350 percent, while our downtime continues to shrink.

In the midst of this multimedia blitzkrieg, the importance of mindfulness and focused attention is rising. If we can’t cultivate mindfulness and focused attention while sitting quietly in a room, then how can we expect to bring these qualities of mind into turbulent circumstances — both on and offline?

FRACTURED ATTENTION, FRACTURED MIND

The average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words every single day, according to the 2008 report from UC San Diego. To put these numbers in perspective, one gigabyte is a symphony in high-fidelity sound or a broadcast quality movie.

Our colossal consuming habits are not only crowding out essential neurological downtime, but they’re creating a chemical addiction that has interest in little else. When we consume media — from watching TV to surfing the Net, and from playing videogames to using social media — we’re triggering the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine creates a “high,” and we are wired to do what it takes to maintain this elevated state. When the dopamine levels decrease, we begin to look for diversions that will restore the high.

In the absence of stimulation, and the corresponding dopamine high, we’re likely to feel bored. As a result, many of us become stimulation junkies and incessant multitaskers. In the New York Times article, “Attached to Technology and Paying the Price,” Matt Richtel wrote, “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress … And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”

THE ANTIDOTE: MINDFULNESS

Living in a connected age is double-edged. While policy and regulation have their place within this matrix, it seems that human agency should be the keystone. Therefore, for the body politic to walk the edge between being empowered by our connectivity or hindered by it requires a steady dose of mind training.

Research at Duke University underscores why. Researchers found that more than 40 percent of our actions are based on habits, not conscious decisions. Unconscious habits and assumptions aren’t destiny, but if we don’t bring them into focus then the force of these habits will continue to chart our course.

The practice of mindfulness is a time-tested antidote to operating in autopilot.

“Mindfulness practice,” according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer of mindfulness-based stress reduction, “means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.”

While the technique of mindfulness isn’t hard, developing a disciplined practice can feel like an Olympic challenge — which is where education comes in.

MIND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS

The direction in which education orients a person, to paraphrase Plato, will determine their future in life. While educational aims should be varied, an underlying goal should be in focusing student awareness in a metacognitive direction. If schools hope to prepare students for our hyper-connected world, it reasons that training students to be proficient with digital tools is only part of the equation.

Students must also be mindful of how digital tools and perpetual web connectivity are shaping their brains, perceptions and habits.

To that end, several promising studies have demonstrated the power of mindfulness mediation in schools to improve executive functioning, reducing stress, anxiety and aggression.

In his book, Techgnosis, Erik Davis also sees another value in integrating mind training into schools:

“The contemporary rise of attention deficit disorder, a condition seemingly linked to the ubiquity of media nets, only underscores how much we need to treat attention as a craft, at once a skill to be learned and a vessel in flight. But the name of this chronic syndrome also contains a clue. For it is precisely disorder that we need to learn to pay attention to, because in that turbulence lies our own future manifold. The mind is an instrument, and we practice scales so that we may improvise with spontaneous grace.”

Aran Levasseur has an eclectic background that ranges from outdoor education to life coaching, and from habitat restoration to video production. He taught middle school history and science for five years, where he integrated technology into his classes to enhance his teaching and student learning.

The article was originally published by PBS MediaShift, covering the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.