College Students Try a Social-Media “Sabbath”

From the Marshall Memo #454

In this thoughtful article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Reiner says he’s trying something new with his Towson University students: a social-media sabbath. “It’s no secret that we’re teaching a generation that is more stressed out, debt-ridden, depressed, anxious, impulsive, scholastically amoral (let’s be honest), self-entitled, bored, and apathetic than perhaps any other since Aristotle sauntered through the Lyceum,” he says. “But what really worries me is students’ preoccupation with social media. Their need to stay perpetually connected through Facebook and texting, in particular, creates a daunting firewall to learning.” 

According to one study, the average American college student spends at least 100 minutes a day on Facebook and three hours texting. Some students experience PVS – Phantom Vibration Syndrome – imagining that someone is texting them, while others “fake text” while waiting for a class to begin so they won’t look like losers. Students are terrified of missing something, being out of the loop, not being available to their friends 24/7. 

Reiner sees this desire to keep the peace with peers in the way students preface comments in class discussions by saying, “First of all, I agree with what you just said…” He believes this reveals the same worry about being different, standing apart from the crowd and wonders, “If so much of our consciousness is focused outside ourselves, on our social relevance, can we remain present and open to the interiority needed for learning?” 

To really understand something requires intimacy with the subject matter – “moving into the space within ourselves where resistance between the seeker (the learner) and the sought (the knowledge) disappears,” says Reiner. “When we allow for intimacy, we open ourselves to two of the most dreaded conditions of our culture – vulnerability and failure.” But both are essential for deep understanding, he believes. Students are hesitant to risk the appearance of nonconformity – and appearing stupid. 

This led Reiner to the idea of a social-media sabbath. He asked students to carve out a four-hour window with absolutely no social media and entertainment technology, and then write about it in a journal. Students detached themselves from outside distractions, decelerated, and consciously, deliberately opened themselves to risk-taking. They sought solitude in trees, watched thunderstorms from atop parking garages, painted for the first time since high school, made eye contact with complete strangers and smiled at them. When the four hours were up, one student said she put her cellphone in her backpack and left it there for the rest of the day. “Know what?” she said. “I hadn’t felt so light in years.”

Reiner urges others to try this experiment in “surpassing civilization.” “It can start with one simple act that’s revolutionary in an age when our attention is forever cast downward onto smartphones and tablets,” he says. “We can lift our gaze into the eyes of other people. As well as into our own. Then we can find the connection we seek, to keep the only peace that matters.”

“Only Disconnect” by Andrew Reiner in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 28, 2012 (Vol. LIX, #5, p. B20), http://bit.ly/PIAzO2