By Grant Rost<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to keep up with the vernacular used to describe a given generation of people.\u00a0 I know that I\u2019m considered to be part of Gen X.\u00a0 I feel like the only reason I know what age bracket a \u201cBoomer\u201d falls into comes by virtue of knowing the date World War II ended.\u00a0 Similarly, my familiarity with whatever \u201cGen Z\u201d is only comes from the fact that I consume research on teaching students in Gen Z.\u00a0 Somewhere along the line, I was told that the bulk of my law school students fell into that category, and I ran with it. I had to look up the hypothetical years of Gen Z\u2014those born from the mid-90\u2019s up to around 2010, if you\u2019re keeping score.\u00a0 If you\u2019re like me, and a great deal of our readers are, you\u2019re teaching a large number of law school students in the Gen Z category.\u00a0 I came across a study recently that I found rather interesting.<\/p>\n
The study was conducted by a company named Jigsaw.\u00a0 Jigsaw is a research subsidiary of Google that \u201cfocuses on online politics and polarization.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 The study hoped to look at the information literacy <\/em>of Gen Z.\u00a0 After time, however, the project researchers all but abandoned that term based on what they were learning about how Gen Z was processing online information.\u00a0 For purposes of this blog, I did a deep dive to come up with a good definition of information literacy and, well, there were so many definitions out there that it was difficult to choose only one.\u00a0 There was a consistent theme, however.\u00a0 It\u2019s this simple idea of information processing as a filtration skill\u2014the ability to filter bad from good, unreliable from reliable.\u00a0 Now that we know that, we can, like the researchers at Jigsaw, toss it out. The researchers, instead, described Gen Z\u2019s processing of online information as \u201cinformation sensibility.\u201d The article describes this as \u201ca \u2018socially informed\u2019 practice that relies on \u2018folk heuristics of credibility.\u2019\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhere older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources,<\/p>\n Gen Zers don\u2019t even bother.\u00a0 They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 comments, to see what everyone else says.\u00a0 They\u2019re outsourcing the determination of truth\u00a0 \u00a0 and importance to like-minded, trusted influencers.\u00a0 And if an article is too long, they just \u00a0\u00a0 skip it\u2026If they have a goal, Jigsaw found, it\u2019s to learn what they need to know to remain \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 cool and conversant in their chosen social groups.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The picture painted doesn\u2019t seem all that flattering at this point.\u00a0 However, the researchers point out that Gen Z still seems to know how <\/em>to research and find scholarly sources of information when they want to, that just isn\u2019t what they are doing with their screen time.\u00a0 Researchers found that the bulk of Gen Z\u2019s engagement with online information was in \u201ctimepass\u201d mode.\u00a0 In this mode, truth or falsity of information becomes unimportant.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 When it does become important, such as the article\u2019s example of the war in Ukraine, that is when scrolling to the comments becomes the default mode of processing the information.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n This made me think of a study I\u2019d read about in The Shallows, <\/em>Nicholas Carr\u2019s Pulitzer-nominated book exploring how internet usage changes our brains.\u00a0 The researcher from this 2008 study says, \u201c[Young people raised in the internet age] don\u2019t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom.\u00a0 They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0 Carr\u2019s book ties the way internet consumers navigate online to the brain\u2019s finite information processing power of \u201ccognitive load.\u201d And this is a problem for all of us who spend a lot of time online.\u00a0 The internet is often a giant firehose of cognitive load and that changes our brain\u2019s processing.\u00a0 Says Carr, \u201cExperiments indicate that as we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise.\u00a0 We become mindless consumers of information.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n At this point, you might be wondering where I\u2019m going with the \u201clesson\u201d part of this \u201cbrain lesson.\u201d Well, it brings me to this constant tension I feel as a teacher of future professionals:\u00a0 Do we adapt the road for the car or the car for the road?\u00a0 Both the article I\u2019ve cited here and uncited portions of Carr\u2019s book indicate that the digitally native, digitally adjusted brain becomes inclined to skip over large blocks of text rather than trying to work to process all of it.\u00a0 But isn\u2019t deep processing the very thing we ask our students to do when we prescribe them significant chunks of textbook reading?\u00a0 We want our students to learn the information, suggesting we ought to teach to the way their brain works.\u00a0 Yet we also know that the real world contains lengthy and cluttered cases that they must carefully and patiently read through in order to fully and accurately process them for their clients\u2019 benefit.\u00a0 We have read the learning-science literature about the power of the so-called \u201cmini-lecture\u201d which puts information in smaller, 5-to-8-minute bites for the ease of student consumption.\u00a0 But you and I both know the practice of law and the trenches of the courtroom don\u2019t take breaks in neat and tidy 5-minute intervals.<\/p>\n And, finally, I come to this question:\u00a0 How much has the online consumption of information shaped me (and us) toward \u201cinformation sensibility\u201d and the \u201cfolk heuristic of credibility\u201d? \u00a0Do I neglect the difficult search for truth in favor of other, cognitively easy approaches?\u00a0 It has me wondering what I am really doing when I scan the comments to articles on weightier topics.\u00a0 Perhaps my internet consumption is moving me further down the generational alphabet, cognitively speaking. \u00a0If Carr\u2019s book, in its breadth and depth, teaches us anything it\u2019s that the brain-shaping power of the internet doesn\u2019t discriminate by some artificial notion of generation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Adam Rogers, Google studied Gen Z.\u00a0 What they found is alarming., BUSINESS INSIDER, MSN.COM, https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/news\/technology\/ar-BB1oQBF4<\/a> (last visited July 22, 2024)<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Id. <\/em><\/p>\n