Turkle, video games, students, and marijuana

I found Turkle's discussion of video game addiction particularly interesting in light of what I have found teaching freshman comp for 10 years.

One of the papers I had my developmental students write was on the causes of the decreasing motivation among college students. I had them begin by reading a 1996 article (maybe old, but NOT dated) from U.S. News and World Report titled "No Books Please, (sic.) We're Students." After establishing that a UCLA study and professors across the country indicated college freshmen were increasingly uninterested in doing any academic work whatsoever, we discussed why students are less motivated than they were in even the 1980s. Several factors came up semester after semester over the course of nine years: soft high school requirements that allowed students to "earn" good grades without doing anything at all, too many responsibilities (which, of course, ignored the fact that the most motivated students were the non-traditional students who had REAL responsibilites outside the classroom) and -- always -- video games.

Video/computer games are VERY addictive. No, they aren't physically addictive. Neither is marijuana. But people keep insisting that it is dangerous because it is psychologically addictive and demotivating.

Even according to what the students themselves say, video games are just as psychologically addictive. They repeatedly told me that they would sit down to play for an hour to unwind after school, and before they knew it, it was time for bed, and they hadn't done any homework.

Education's response, in some ways, is to attempt to turn learning into a video game.

At what point should students have to accept the fact that not everything they do in life is a video game and not everything is interesting or fun? Filling out tax forms isn't interesting or fun. Even in the best of jobs, there are parts that are far from interesting or fun. I've never done it, but I can't imagine that changing diapers is interesting or fun. We have raised a generation in a "Sesame Street Culture" that teaches that anything that isn't fun can just be ignored. Don't get me wrong; fun educational programming for elementary school and pre-school kids is great. But allowing students to continue to think all the way through high school and beyond that if something bores them, they don't have to do it is dangerous. (I once had a student say he didn't read the one-page article because "it was boring." I asked him if he was familiar with the term "irony." Naturally, he wasn't.)

I like computer games, when I have time for them. But the whole idea of time managment escapes younger students, and video games are really dangerous. If I had kids, I wouldn't allow them in my house.

I also found the whole "disembodied" cyborg discussion interesting. I'm doing my book review on Getting It On Online, and the author argues that computer communication is NOT disembodied. I don't entirely agree with him, but I haven't finished the book yet. I think it IS somewhat disembodied in that we can make up any body we choose. The whole online "romance" sex phenomena just seems like another form of Penthouse Forum to me. "I am a student at a large midwestern university" written by various paid writers of various ages and genders is no different from a/s/l? being answered as 22/f/New York by a middle-aged man in Omaha. Except in chatting online with people you know in the real world, you have no way of knowing to whom you are speaking online. I "chat" with one person (the only person who also has my cell phone number), and I do that only because I am prohibited from seeing him face to face, which is infinitely preferable. Of course, since he and I talk online in complete sentences, I am totally lost in attempting to chat with people who think "i am hot 4 u" is communicating in English.

As I've said before, I have no interest in being a cyborg. I find the whole idea insulting. I'm a human being, and even the lowliest human being is infinitely superior to the most powerful machine. A machine is a THING. The whole concept that people would even debate the acceptability of the "cyborg" label really saddens me because it seems we have devalued humanity to such a large degree. If this is what things are coming to, we would be better off without the technology.