Multitasking Leads to Narrative Deprivation

She was looking down, a smile on her face, hands beneath the desk where she sat.

“You know,” I rehearsed the aforementioned posture aloud, “A student in such a position obviously has other concerns on her mind.” Redfaced, my pupil smiled sheepishly. Busted, she slowly placed her smart phone in her handbag. Facebook or phone messages or texts drive student attention, no matter the professor, the material, or the course. At times, a classroom instructor is no match for immediate electronic connections.

Some teachers mandate no electronics in class. Others require all cell phones be placed in the middle of the room, retrieved when the bell rings. Still more professors do not care, saying that the student will pay for their inattention through course grades. I know of a minority of instructors who encourage computer use, relying on the surfing exploits of young minds to bring world-wide-web insights immediately to the classes’ attention. And depending on which researcher you talk to, access to the internet is either making us stupid or brilliant.

“Multitasking” has been the title of an assignment I give to masters level students; I’m anxious to gain students’ reactions to the issue. In their reading, multitasking was referred to as a myth,  twitching, a cocktail party, brain-splitting, and the shallows. They were to apply a Christian point-of-view to the concept, identifying three biblical-theological insights of their own. They then had to engage the general idea of multitasking within their own ministry contexts.

The reflective questions included:

• How does multitasking impact you as a minister?

• How does multitasking impact your ministry?

• How does multitasking impact those with whom and for whom you minister?

• How do the common grace results of research impact how we think about multitasking?

• What current cultural assumptions are necessary for a positive response to multitasking?

• How should multitasking assumptions be biblically accepted or countered?

• What is the result of multitasking? Identify what may be gained or lost.

The resultant papers and classroom discussion were telling. Most of the students saw problems with multitasking, but still accepted the practice as a necessary evil in ministry. Some days after the classroom discussion, I saw the future of multitaskers through the writing of Jessica Helfand, author of Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture. Jessica says,

The impatience with which people have come to expect everything to be delivered to them is a terrifying prospect.

The Yale graphic design critic calls the phenomenon “short attention span theater” and says it’s amplified by the digital gadgets most of us carry these days. Her students are constantly engaged in multimedia multitasking — reading, working on essays and checking Facebook every 10 minutes.


”You just have to wonder to what degree are they actually assimilating anything. And my big concern is how deep anybody can go if they’re spread so thin, if they skim everything.”

This skimming generation is going to be producing the media we consume, which Helfand calls both an opportunity and a challenge. She says,

“A friend of mine actually referred to this recently as, this is the culture of narrative deprivation.”

My online media guru and I were updating my website recently. During the phone conversation Ryan had me focus on one of my essays. He then read the essay as some readers might read it online. I couldn’t believe my ears. I had trouble keeping up with Ryan’s reading even though I was looking right at the words. The reason? According to Ryan’s research, readers of an online blog will literally skip through the article, skimming words as they go.

My communication professor nodded her head as I recounted the experience. “Imagine all the children who are missing nursery rhymes, poetry, tall tales, classic stories, and morality tales,” she lamented.

“Narrative deprivation” is exactly the problem.

Consumed by the cell phone under the table, I despair my student may become story-less.

We have no reason to carry on a great narrative because we know no stories to tell.

Mark loves stories, tells stories, buys stories, reads stories, knowing that stories can only be told because The Story exists. Mark’s students love to hear his stories whenever, wherever he teaches.