Reflection and Review, that’s the theme of the week as we look back and see what we’ve been able to learn so far from this course and from our exhaustive deep work that we chronicle on these blog posts. So that’s the big question, have I actually learned anything? The answer is yes, to my surprise I have actually learned something.
It was subtle and it wasn’t extraordinary amounts of information, but I have learned quite a lot. I’ve learned about the art of the blog and how to present myself and my theme in a professional way. I have learned the importance of project management and scheduling in order to achieve deep work, even if I don’t agree with using all the different project management apps that are in society. But most importantly I have learned/ been made more aware of the fact that I pay no attention of my own health and get overwhelmed and poorly multitask way too often. If you send me a text or email asking me for something, I answer them all at the time of the day or week and never make people wait.
As I continued to look into the important information I have learned over the semester, and keep reading the course materials assigned this week, I couldn’t help but think if there was a way social media or technological distractions were helping or hindering how much we learn in school courses. In the article “The Art of Staying Focused in a Distracting World”, the tech executive Linda Stone talks about as a child we develop our own strategies for learning and paying attention and that even with growing dependence on social media we still have that base practice to go off of. “Let’s talk about reading or building things. When you did those things, nobody was giving you an assignment, nobody was telling you what to do there wasn’t any stress around it. You did these things for your own pleasure and joy. As you played, you developed a capacity for attention and for a type of curiosity and experiment that can happen when you play” (Fallows 2,3). When she talks about learning through pleasure and happiness, it struck a chord, that that’s what hasn’t been connecting with me about deep work. I’ve been going through this class with the mentality that as long as I do the work necessary, I can get the grade, but if I were to just go back to my roots and have fun with the blog, keep pushing the limits of the art work I make for the top of them and spend time daily on it to make it more my own, then I’d probably learn more.
In a new section of Deep Work about “embracing boredom”, Newport brings up a similar point. “A number of these people are highly successful (professionally), but it wasn’t some fancy school that pushed their intellect higher; it became clear it was instead their daily study that started as early as the fifth grade,” (Newport 156). You learn more and retain more the more and more you do it. The more I focus on just this blog and work deeply the easier it will be and the easier it will be to stop getting distracted by other unimportant outside diversions.
So if the answer to learning more and retaining more for long periods of time, is just to take a step back and enjoy the lessons and practice them over and over again, then why does social media and the use of technology constantly get brought up as a hindrance to education?
In the other article we were given this week, “Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment”, the author shows the downside of having a constantly updated reverse chronological news feed. “A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines,” (Thompson 4). Just like what we’re doing this week in class which is taking a step back and looking at the past to see how far we’ve come and if I couldn’t separate myself from the present moment then I would have continued on thinking of the class in a negative manner and not seen the value that could come from it.
But after completing the different readings and compiling all I’ve learned so far, I wanted to know more about how social media affects your processing of knowledge because it couldn’t just be that it keeps you stuck in the present moment, and I was right. It doesn’t.
In an article about the “weird effects of social media” it talks about the fact that the overuse of social media creates more grey matter in our minds. And grey matter is the contents in our brains that helps us remember a bunch of things like faces and names, but it doesn’t help us make connections between them, that’s white matter. “In this study, grey matter in the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus, and the entorhinal cortex, which are the parts of the brain responsible for social perception (recognizing faces) and memory, respectively, were much higher if a person had a larger social network. Basically, if you have more Facebook friends, you are probably better at remembering things,” (Beres).
So basically constantly using social media leads to our minds being able to remember loads of useless things that none of us actually need in life, but if we were to lessen our use of social media then we could think deeper and make intelligent connections between large concepts. We could also leave the present moment and look back on history in order to see what we’ve learned but also what others before us have learned through their past mistakes.
In the end, when I was told to reflect on this class so far, I groaned and I had assumed it was nothing, but after stopping and thinking, there have been many things I have gained from this course and one of those things being, to stop and enjoy the work you’re doing because you’ll get so much more out of it.
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