On 14 March 1716, the aspiring lawyer Dudley Ryder wrote in his diary:
“I have had lately a great mind to dance well and as I stood to read I endeavoured to keep my toe out while I was reading, which took up my thoughts so much that my reading was not with so good effect as it should have been.” 1
When I first read this passage, I had two responses. Firstly, amusement; I imagined a young man standing book in hand, toe protruding, all the while trying to concentrate on his reading. Perhaps Ryder wobbled and teetered as his occupied hands failed to steady his balance. Secondly, I resonated with Ryder. Although over three hundred years separate me and this passage, Ryder struck a chord with something that seems to abound in today’s world. Try as we may, we both suffer from the seemingly inescapable retardant to learning: distractions.
We may judge from Ryder’s diary that distractions are nothing new. Yet I feel, and I am not the only one to do so, that there are more distractions now than there were five years ago. Additionally, the nature of distractions seems to have changed; we are distracted by things that are at once more vapid and stimulating. Rather than our reading being distracted by the noble pursuit of dancing, it is, for me at least, driven off course by needless, unrewarding activities. Checking emails, WhatsApp, Instagram, and BBC News constitute my four cardinal sins. For me, these distractions are all facilitated by one common denominator: the laptop.
The laptop seems innocuous, especially compared to a smartphone, and there is some truth to this. Smartphones are more mobile than a laptop. To be distracted by emails on my laptop, I need a Wi-Fi connection. With a smartphone, I can check my emails essentially anywhere. However, I now largely go without a smartphone, leading to my laptop replacing my smartphone as Distractor General of Education.
It is the perfect storm, really. The laptop is at once a social and educative device, combining the distracting features of a smartphone with the tools supposedly necessary to learning. Two examples will help to illustrate my point.
Our ability to read and quality of doing so is being held back by laptops. You are sitting in the library, reading a journal article or e-book on your laptop, typing your notes away in split screen mode. Suddenly, that tingling feeling comes over you, that you might have received an email, a WhatsApp from your friend, or perhaps a Third World War has broken out. Without thinking: Ctrl-T. You type “G” and hit enter, the URL for your Gmail filling itself in. Another Ctrl-T. “W”. Enter. WhatsApp starts to load. Again, Ctrl-T. “B”. Enter. Thankfully, a Third World War has not broken out. In fact, the BBC News page is just as it was when you checked less than ten minutes ago. Ctrl-W. Perhaps WhatsApp will offer me some stimulation instead. No? Nothing? Perhaps your friends hate you. Ctrl-W. Third time’s the charm for Gmail? Aha! Something stimulating! My profile is getting viewed on LinkedIn, apparently. Ctrl-W. Back to read- Hold on, how could I forget? Ctrl-T. “Outlook”. Enter. Jackpot! The Oxford Student Newsletter will be able to distract me for a whole forty seconds. Eventually, Ctrl-W. Your screen flicks back to a thirty page article. You are two pages in. What was the author writing about again? Perhaps you will “speed things up” and resort to Ch*tGPT instead.
My point here is that laptops are not conducive to thoughtful reading.2 They present too many distractions, too many ways to torpedo the ship of our precious, sought after attention span. For me, effective reading requires limited interruptions, it requires continuity of attention. Laptops and reading, much like dancing and reading for Dudley Ryder, do not marry well.
A solution? Write your notes by hand. Having transitioned to handwriting my notes several months ago, it does make a great difference to both my enjoyment and quality of reading. The comparative slowness of handwriting makes my notes more thoughtful, focussed, and improves my memory retention of what I am reading. Margins are also amazing (sorry Ctrl-Alt-M comments). Reading from a physical book increases my attentiveness and helps with small things, like navigating more easily to endnotes or bibliographies. I still use my laptop for writing essays and indeed this column. Likewise to read journal articles, although I download them to read without a web browser. The laptop remains good for many things. But for reading? I’m not going back.
Neither do laptops create a healthy seminar environment. Two recent experiences demonstrate my point. I am in a seminar and we are giving presentations. Someone close to me is doing similar things to what I outlined above. Checking WhatsApp, Instagram, and so on. They are not paying attention to the presenter (i.e. being rude), and in truth, they are probably not paying much attention to the Instagram stories they are flicking through at break-neck speed either. A few days later in another seminar, someone next to me is messaging people on their laptop. At other times, the individual looks things up related to the seminar, but does not get much further than Google’s AI overview. In both cases, these individuals’ self-distraction also distracts me.
These people are not really in the room. They are elsewhere. And they can “get away with it” because the laptop gives them cover; they may be writing notes on their laptop, but they may also be living in the Internet world. If they were doing this on their smartphone they would, I would like to think, be asked to stop by the seminar leader. The smartphone more easily signifies distractedness than a laptop, yet they harm us in similar ways.
I have been guilty of this as much as anyone. When awaiting to receive outcomes for my Master’s applications, I had an acute penchant for checking my emails mid-seminar. But this distraction detracted from my mental presence in the classroom. Additionally, there is something about not having the world at your fingertips that makes you think harder and take more risks. In my experience, if all I have are my paper notes and memory of other scholarship to draw on, I think more consciously than I would if I had every article and book I have read available to me a few clicks away.
Laptops are Janus-faced things. They are at once enhancers and detractors of learning. Unfortunately, from my own experience and voyeurism for others’ distractability, in most cases the power of laptops to distract outweighs their educative benefits. I first used a laptop in a classroom in high school, but only intermittently. At college, online learning was my gateway drug for laptop-based distractions in the “classroom”. Come university, the laptop took over without me noticing it. So much of my education relied on my laptop.
I am less intent on advocating for a university-wide ban on laptops in the classroom. Given the laptop-dominanted reality in which we live in and the genuine reliance on laptops for some learning (I expect laptops are quite useful for those studying Computer Science, for example), this would be impractical. But on an individual level, people should take a step back and reflect on their relationship with their laptop.
Perhaps you are in a library or seminar right now, reading this article. I suggest you Ctrl-W. Return to reading, listening, or contributing to a discussion. Afterall, you are probably paying a lot for this education, so you might as well get your money’s worth.