Frontline - Digital-Nation

Frontline has another installment of their Digital Nation program. It is about 90 minutes of run time but very interesting stuff on:
-multi-tasking
-gaming
-virtual communities

MIT students were quite strong (perhaps even cocky) in their assessment of their own ability to multitask. Under controlled circumstances they actually do very poorly at it.

And there are some very interesting segments on how closely people can become connected without ever meeting each other in the flesh... virtual communities. They really know a lot about each other and care for each other.

Always a big shake up when you make huge paradigm shifts - pictures to alphabet/words; spoken word/memory to mass printed text; now to the digital world as well. Some things are lost and other things are gained. It will require thoughtful consideration, and some testing, to see which of the new patterns emerging among the digital natives are helpful and which are not... if that is even the best way to phrase it. If your "community" is made up of folks physically very far away from you, what happens when you need local folks to care for you physically in times of crisis? What is lost when we keep making our brain work in shorter and shorter busts as we multi-task. How important is the ability to think/work on one thing for a long time in a focused way? (Digital natives write their research papers - by their own admission - in paragraph bursts... often in unconnected paragraph bursts.) Are there some things that need sustained thought or you just don't 'get' them?