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  • 6/5/2025
A look at "the risks and possibilities, myths and realities" of "life on the digital frontier".

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00:00:29In 2007, Frontline broadcast a film called Growing Up Online.
00:00:34You need to have the Internet on to talk to your friends because everybody uses it.
00:00:38You can be more crazy online because there's no one watching to see what you're actually doing.
00:00:41I had no idea what she was doing on the Internet.
00:00:44That was a big surprise.
00:00:45But today, it's not just our kids.
00:00:47All of us are immersed in technology all the time.
00:00:51This is a digital moment in my life.
00:00:53From multitasking.
00:00:54Multitasking could be essentially dumbing down the world.
00:00:58To the military.
00:00:59It is a complete cultural change for the Air Force.
00:01:02In work.
00:01:03I mean, you've all met in real life at one point, right?
00:01:05Actually, no.
00:01:05And at play.
00:01:06The first hour, I was hooked.
00:01:08I would play literally nonstop.
00:01:11And on the virtual frontier.
00:01:12The question is, are we entering a new paradigm?
00:01:14Or is this just the next best thing?
00:01:16That's okay. They're not in the real world.
00:01:18I think that you will live in the virtual world a significant percentage of the time.
00:01:22Tonight, Frontline producer Rachel Dretson and correspondent Douglas Rushkoff
00:01:26look at the wired world we're living in.
00:01:29Our new digital nation.
00:01:31I kind of want to push the pause button.
00:01:34And everything stops and we can look and say,
00:01:36just what's going on here?
00:01:38So, it really hit me one night not that long ago.
00:02:02I was in the kitchen and I was cooking dinner, chopping vegetables,
00:02:06and my husband was in the next room on his laptop.
00:02:08And across the table from my husband was my oldest son,
00:02:11who was also on a laptop doing his homework.
00:02:13Wash your hands.
00:02:14Did you wash your hands?
00:02:14And my younger kids had picked up my iPhone and we're playing a game on it or something.
00:02:19And, uh, I don't know.
00:02:22It just hit me.
00:02:23We're all in the same house, but we're also in other worlds.
00:02:27And, uh, I don't know.
00:02:30It just kind of snuck up on us.
00:02:32I didn't see it coming.
00:02:33These young teenagers on the phones and on the computers is amazing.
00:02:45Like, when I was growing up, it wasn't like that.
00:02:47I just remember when I went on my honeymoon 25 years ago,
00:02:52we were away for two weeks and we didn't know anything that happened
00:02:56in the two weeks that we were gone because we were on vacation.
00:02:59And that simply doesn't happen anymore.
00:03:01We now have these tools to reach so many people.
00:03:04All of a sudden, we look around and say, well, you know, now what?
00:03:09Well over half my life exists in the digital world.
00:03:12I'm connected to my BlackBerry.
00:03:13I need it at all times.
00:03:15I can't even imagine, I can't even imagine not having it.
00:03:19I use my phone.
00:03:20I go on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, everything.
00:03:24That's my digital life.
00:03:29This is the first place, this is where it all began.
00:03:31This is the first college where they were...
00:03:33When I started this project, looking at life in the digital age,
00:03:36the first person I turned to was my friend Douglas Rushkoff,
00:03:40whom I've worked with on two previous films.
00:03:42Doug's been writing about the internet for close to two decades.
00:03:47Well, geeks are normal now.
00:03:49It's true.
00:03:50We decided to start here,
00:03:51on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
00:03:56If anyone is a new species of digital native,
00:04:00it would be the MIT student.
00:04:02These kids are among the smartest, most wired people on the planet right now.
00:04:06They may hardly remember a time when they weren't able to be online anywhere they went.
00:04:19I have three tests this week.
00:04:21Everywhere you go on this campus, kids are looking at screens, sometimes multiple screens.
00:04:26Do you want an email back?
00:04:27I was productive on Saturday.
00:04:30I'm coming up Friday.
00:04:31It's in beta right now, so...
00:04:32Take Eliza.
00:04:33She's 20, a mechanical engineering major, and completely wired all the time.
00:04:38Is it going to stay in beta for as long as Gmail stayed in beta?
00:04:40Like, a decade.
00:04:42I have a few friends who, if they hear the word Blackberry, they think of me.
00:04:45Like, I am never off of it.
00:04:46It is glued to me when it's more than arm's length for me.
00:04:48I start to get panicky.
00:04:49It's very disconcerting.
00:04:50I like how I'm like, I'll pull it up and show you, and I don't even send it to you.
00:04:53Are we Gchat buddies?
00:04:54Can I just...
00:04:55I'm always IMing or texting or things like that.
00:04:57Always checking my phone, taking care of other things while I'm doing something else.
00:05:00You are talking to your friend at the same time you're talking to your other friend at the same time you're emailing another friend about what you're going to do tomorrow night.
00:05:07Dude, classes here aren't fun, man.
00:05:09We kind of understand that, too, between each other.
00:05:11We're all so busy that it's okay if I'm talking to Murph right now and his Blackberry goes off and he has to start going on.
00:05:15I'm like, well, that's okay, because I'm going to do that to him anyway.
00:05:18So, you just...
00:05:19It's a mutual understanding.
00:05:20We're the girls tonight.
00:05:21School, I think, is just kind of the same.
00:05:22Like, you're paying attention in class to your professor, you're emailing another professor, and you're looking at something else.
00:05:28Nobody who's been teaching for 25 years would say that our students aren't different now than they were then.
00:05:33I mean, they need...
00:05:34They need to be stimulated in ways they didn't need to be stimulated before.
00:05:38Sherry Turkle has been teaching at MIT for more than 30 years.
00:05:44Every professor who looks out onto a sea of students these days knows there's email, Facebook, Googling me, Googling them, Googling their next-door neighbor that's happening in the classroom.
00:06:00Like most universities, MIT allows laptops in its classes at the professor's discretion.
00:06:06I mean, it even changes how teachers teach, because now the pressure is on teaching kind of scintillating PowerPoint things that will distract them from the web.
00:06:17So you have hit on most of the key points.
00:06:19There are two sorts of things you can test students about.
00:06:22You can test how well they're paying attention in lecture, and you can test how well they're absorbing information from readings that you assign.
00:06:28And I don't think they're doing either of those things well.
00:06:31I have no idea how that's possible.
00:06:33I just gave my class a midterm, and I was really asking obvious questions that had they been attending carefully in lecture, and had they been doing the readings carefully, everyone should have gotten 100% on this exam.
00:06:43And the mean score was probably about a 75%.
00:06:45It's not that the students are dumb.
00:06:48It's not that they're not trying.
00:06:50I think they're trying in a way that's not as effective as it could be, because they're distracted by everything else.
00:06:55I teach at MIT.
00:06:57I teach the most brilliant students in the world.
00:07:00But they have done themselves a disservice by drinking the Kool-Aid and believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes.
00:07:17There really are important things you cannot think about unless it's still, and you're only thinking about one thing at a time.
00:07:25There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things.
00:07:32Well, I have 25 in the last 15 minutes.
00:07:35I feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well, and that we do at all times.
00:07:41And so if they try and, you know, restrict us from doing it, it's almost unfair because we are completely capable of moving in between lecture and other things and just keeping track of the many things that are going on in our lives.
00:07:54No one's actually measured whether these kids are as successful at multitasking as they claim to be.
00:07:59But out in California, a respected research lab is studying their counterparts on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto.
00:08:07You know, they understand the research, they're smart kids, but they seem utterly convinced it doesn't apply to them.
00:08:13We want to study what's really going on in the brain.
00:08:16The fMRI studies we're going to be seeing, when it comes to what parts of the brain, we know nothing.
00:08:21These are really the first studies of brain imaging of multitaskers versus non-multitaskers.
00:08:27So anything we discover here is new because we know zero.
00:08:31Now, in this lab here, we're researching, speaking on the cell phone while driving.
00:08:36Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult person.
00:08:40You walk around the world and you see people multitasking.
00:08:44They're playing games and they're reading email and they're on Facebook, etc.
00:08:48Yet, classic psychology says that's impossible.
00:08:51No one can do that.
00:08:53In general, our brains can't do two things at once.
00:08:56And we want to ask the question, how do they do it?
00:08:59Do they have some secret ingredient, some special ability that psychologists had no idea about?
00:09:04Or what's going on?
00:09:05You guys were chosen because you're very high chronic multitaskers.
00:09:11Nass allowed us to film one of his studies, conducted on a group of carefully chosen students.
00:09:18On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once.
00:09:23These are kids who are doing five, six or more things at once all the time.
00:09:28The experiment looks simple.
00:09:31Identify numbers as odd or even.
00:09:33Letters as vowels or consonants.
00:09:36But it's rife with traps in the form of distractions.
00:09:40Nass is testing how quickly these kids can switch between tasks without losing their focus.
00:09:46I'm pretty much constantly texting.
00:09:49And whenever I study, I have my laptop out and listen to music.
00:09:51Brian is a junior.
00:09:52I'm watching a YouTube video.
00:09:53I'm checking my email.
00:09:55Non-stop refreshing the page.
00:09:56I'm on Facebook, Facebook chat.
00:09:58He's pretty confident that his multitasking is successful.
00:10:01So that I can always stay connected.
00:10:03So you think you're effective?
00:10:04I think so.
00:10:05Okay.
00:10:06But his results, like others Nass has tested, suggested otherwise.
00:10:10What we found was that you're actually significantly slower when you're switching than when you're
00:10:15doing kind of the same task consistently.
00:10:18Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking.
00:10:21And one of the big discoveries is, you know what?
00:10:24You're really lousy at it.
00:10:26It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking.
00:10:31They get distracted constantly.
00:10:33Their memory is very disorganized.
00:10:36Recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytic reasoning.
00:10:40We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.
00:10:45When I got back to New York, I noticed how much I, too, fell prey to distractions.
00:10:53I kept catching myself in the act, checking my email when I should have been writing a script,
00:10:59Googling something to satisfy a random curiosity.
00:11:03This is affecting all of us.
00:11:04The Shakespeare quote is, we are consumed by that which we are nourished by.
00:11:11Speaking for myself, if all I do is my email and my calendar and my searches and my, I feel great.
00:11:20I feel like a master of the universe, getting my calendar and my meetings and my, I just feel great.
00:11:28And then, it's the end of the day, I've been busy all day, and I haven't thought about anything hard.
00:11:39I mean, the point is, the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to distract ourselves to death.
00:11:50Distraction.
00:11:52Combating distraction isn't as easy as turning off your email program.
00:11:56If you turn off your email program, it's not the software that's going to complain, it's the people on the other side.
00:12:02Your friends, your boss, your bills.
00:12:04You know, where's, where's my report?
00:12:06Why haven't you answered your email?
00:12:07Are you mad at me?
00:12:09You can't do this in isolation.
00:12:11If you're going to deal with the problem of distraction, it's something we're going to have to deal with together.
00:12:18I feel like something's out of whack.
00:12:19Maybe it's time to press the pause button.
00:12:21Well, it's not just you, it's everybody.
00:12:23We need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize.
00:12:27Changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff.
00:12:35I mean, look at these kids.
00:12:37According to the latest data, most of them are spending more than 50 hours a week with digital media.
00:12:43That's more than a full work week.
00:12:45What is this doing to their brains?
00:12:49You have young people whose brains are not fully developed.
00:12:53So how a young person chooses to spend their time will have a profound effect on what their brain will be like for the rest of their lives.
00:13:01So far, there's only one neuroscientist who's actually examined the impact of the Internet on our brains.
00:13:08Dr. Gary Small at UCLA, he took MRI scans of people's brain activity reading a book and then another doing an Internet search.
00:13:18This summarizes what we found in that brain on Google study.
00:13:23So here's your brain reading a book.
00:13:27Here's your brain on Google.
00:13:29More than twofold increase in the extent of activity.
00:13:33Notice how much activity there is in the front part of the brain, the decision-making part of the brain,
00:13:38which makes sense because we know we're making lots of decisions when we're searching online.
00:13:43So you'd think more brain activity, all that read, means Google is making us smarter.
00:13:49And in fact, that's what most of the headlines said when Small's research was first released.
00:13:54But I knew it couldn't be that simple.
00:13:56Where's the other picture?
00:13:58The reading one.
00:13:59I feel like this does not do reading justice.
00:14:02Well, you know, on a brain scan, big is not necessarily better.
00:14:07You know, if you go to the gym and you start lifting weights, at first you're going to have to use a lot of energy.
00:14:11But if you train, you're going to become much better.
00:14:14You're going to be in better shape, you're going to lift more weight, and it's not going to take that much energy.
00:14:18So one could argue Small is better.
00:14:21It's a little bit like playing golf.
00:14:23You want your score to go down.
00:14:26So wait a second.
00:14:27All that media hype and the doctor himself isn't so sure about their conclusions?
00:14:33Small's study wasn't a confirmation of the Internet's beneficial effects.
00:14:37If anything, it was a call for some real research now.
00:14:42So why isn't anyone looking at the real effects of near-constant net use?
00:14:47By the time you design a research study, apply for funding, implement the study, and you publish the results about the technology, what has happened?
00:14:57The technology is obsolete.
00:14:58We move beyond it.
00:14:59And so the technology and the practices that go with the new technologies, they keep outdistancing the research.
00:15:06The research can't catch up with it.
00:15:08We're immersed in it, and it's changing so rapidly, we're just beginning to grasp what's happening.
00:15:16So think of how long it took us to understand that smoking was bad for our health.
00:15:22I think it takes people a while for reality to hit them in the face.
00:15:27It's hard to get people to stop texting while they're driving, although it's a 23 times greater risk of having an accident.
00:15:37How do you get people to stop these behaviors? It's very difficult.
00:15:41Since when has spending time online become a risky behavior like drinking or gambling?
00:15:47Is it that addictive?
00:15:48I think it's addictive.
00:15:50There's controversy among experts, whether it is or not.
00:15:55In Asia, there's a recognition that teenagers, many teenagers, are addicted to video games.
00:16:01I think that we're behind the Asians in terms of focusing on the problem.
00:16:16It's hard to follow the story of Asia's digital revolution without somehow ending up in South Korea.
00:16:25South Korea's digital culture isn't characterized by the home computer so much as its legendary internet cafes,
00:16:36known as PC Bangs, which dot the streets of every major city here.
00:16:40There are thousands of them in Seoul alone, offering cheap, 24-7, high-speed internet access
00:16:49to the tens of thousands of kids who want to play video games all day or even all night.
00:16:54Do you ever stay overnight? All night?
00:17:00It's here in the PC Bangs, people say, that the Korean gaming craze has gotten out of hand.
00:17:16And it was sobering to see row after row of kids glued to these screens, expressionless.
00:17:23As it turns out, a few people have actually died in PC Bangs after gaming marathons where they played 50 hours or more with little food or water.
00:17:33We read the newspaper about Korea. They say gaming is a problem now, that people are addicted to the games,
00:17:42addicted to the internet, and they're not getting their studies done. Do you feel is there a problem for you?
00:17:47There's an argument about whether it's a real disease or just a phenomenon.
00:18:04But we think it's definitely an addiction.
00:18:06The Korean government commissioned this psychiatrist, Dr. Ahn Deung-hyun, to conduct a three-year study on the question of internet addiction.
00:18:20His findings helped Korea become one of the first countries to treat it as a psychiatric disorder.
00:18:28About 90 percent of Korean children use the internet in their daily life.
00:18:33Of those, about 10 to 15 percent are in the high-risk group.
00:18:47What's now a public health crisis began with the best of intentions.
00:18:56Ten years ago, this country emerged from economic crisis by refashioning its culture and commerce
00:19:02around digital technology.
00:19:06Its embrace of the online world was broad and deep.
00:19:10And it's not altogether surprising that South Korea has become one of the first countries
00:19:14to confront the fallout of the digital revolution.
00:19:23We met 15-year-old Chung Young-il in a city south of Seoul.
00:19:27It's pretty extreme.
00:19:28I play seven or eight hours a day.
00:19:32Then, on weekends, I stay up all night on the computer.
00:19:36When Young-il starts a game, he doesn't know when to stop, and he just plays for hours.
00:19:41Over the last year, Young-il has dropped from the top half of his class to the bottom.
00:19:56His mother thinks it's because of the computer.
00:19:59I'm not sure, but I think he mostly uses the computer to play some type of fighting game.
00:20:09I wish those games didn't exist.
00:20:11That inability to communicate with me, his own mother, makes me so sad.
00:20:30I think if I can't control him right now, I may lose my son.
00:20:36This is an addiction.
00:20:39Only an addict could act this way.
00:20:50In an effort to help kids like Young-il, the Korean government has opened free Internet
00:20:55rescue camps throughout the country.
00:20:57At the recommendation of a teacher, Young-il's mother will be leaving him here for two weeks.
00:21:18The day starts with a group counseling session.
00:21:20Most of the kids here say they've had to seek medical treatment for conditions that resulted
00:21:38from overusing the computer, like eye strain and ear complications.
00:21:44The kids' treatment regimen, surprisingly low-tech, seemed designed mainly to recapture a childhood
00:22:02lost to the computer.
00:22:04When you go home, will you start using computer again, or will it be different?
00:22:21Honestly, I don't expect a lot.
00:22:25Not using the computer for 10 days was hard.
00:22:29I just kept thinking about the games, or about getting out of the camp and going home.
00:22:40My heart went out to these kids, casualties of the digital revolution.
00:22:47For better and for worse, these people are connected and connecting through the technologies
00:22:52that I championed 20 years ago, when I first started writing and speaking about a future
00:22:57I called Siberia.
00:22:59His latest is called Siberia.
00:23:02Doug Rushkoff joined us this morning in New York.
00:23:04Hello, Doug.
00:23:05Hi. Good to be here.
00:23:06In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people
00:23:10about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives.
00:23:14Are folks getting a little afraid of the technology since it's going so quickly?
00:23:19Are we going to be left in the dust, or can we keep up?
00:23:22Well, I think people get scared as things develop, especially when they...
00:23:25Back then, I was convinced the web could help us change in profoundly good ways,
00:23:30allowing us to evolve into better people.
00:23:32Well, I'd like to introduce you, Ms. Thoman, to the new human being.
00:23:36No, there's definitely...
00:23:38It's a new human being that's evolved, I think, to the next level,
00:23:42and I think it's fascinating and wonderful to watch.
00:23:46I felt like I was in on a secret, that these old fuddy-duddies were just panicking,
00:23:51underestimating our kids' ability to adapt to the new reality before us.
00:23:56If you're actually moving around the pixels yourself on the screen...
00:23:59Over the past 20 years, however, the net has changed from a thing one does
00:24:04to the way one lives, connected all the time.
00:24:08And it appears that far more of these kids than I would have thought are overwhelmed.
00:24:15The Korean government has taken an assertive approach to addressing the social problems caused by the net.
00:24:27At Korean elementary schools, kids are taught to go online around the same time they are taught to read.
00:24:36But they're also taught something else, how to use computers responsibly.
00:24:50It's required for Korean students, starting in the second grade.
00:24:58At this school, signs preaching healthy internet habits line the hallways.
00:25:03And what's this one say?
00:25:05Slenderous comments on internet hurts my friends.
00:25:09And this one says,
00:25:10Constantly playing computer games shrinks your capacity to think.
00:25:16Our ancestors were known as the politest eastern state.
00:25:20Now, we are the kingdom of internet etiquette.
00:25:25When a child is just six years old,
00:25:39what's the most important things they need to learn about the internet?
00:25:44I think they must learn ethics first, internet etiquette and manners,
00:25:49and then learn the technical side of it.
00:25:53Watching these kids, I'm skeptical that this top-down approach could ever work in America.
00:25:59I guess we'll have to find our own way.
00:26:02Availing what I should to learn?
00:26:03I would больше JEFF AMBIER
00:26:16By the way I'd never do that on paper,
00:26:18two champions friends and manners.
00:26:20I should learn how to keep hearing Porco and teachers in the middle of it.
00:26:24By the way, my cadaule is always thinking even better.
00:26:30At home in Brooklyn, I have three digital natives of my own.
00:26:42Watching my kids with the computer, I find myself wondering, how did they figure this
00:26:46out? Were these skills somehow handed out at birth? And could anything that seemed so
00:26:52natural really be bad?
00:27:00Last fall, after a lot of careful consideration, we decided to send our oldest son to a middle
00:27:06school that requires him to use a laptop in class and for most of his homework.
00:27:11We figured since he's likely to be using computers for the rest of his life, he might as well
00:27:17learn to use them in a school setting.
00:27:19What are you doing?
00:27:21I'm looking at these blogs for my English history.
00:27:28Show me.
00:27:30So this one's about current events.
00:27:32Wait, who wrote these blogs?
00:27:34Our class. I mean, it was homework one night. So this is all about current events.
00:27:37But how do you know how to make a blog?
00:27:39And this is mine. It's called EduBlog.
00:27:41It's really cool because you can add links like this and you can add comments.
00:27:46There's a difference between the people who grew up with the technology and the people
00:27:50who didn't. So I'm an immigrant to this world, whereas the kids who grew up in it are natives.
00:27:56Where are we? There we are. 19 responses. The answer is Middle Ages. Why?
00:28:02We filmed at this high school in Chatham, New Jersey when we were making our last documentary,
00:28:06Growing Up Online, which looked at the impact of the Internet on adolescents.
00:28:10How many are confident of their answers?
00:28:12The school had largely embraced the idea that their classrooms need to meet kids where they're living, online.
00:28:18If you look at all these images, see, these are, these take place at different times.
00:28:23Steve Mayer was a history teacher there.
00:28:25If you think about the media environment that an average American teenager lives in,
00:28:31to walk into a classroom that doesn't have any of that media must be like walking into a desert.
00:28:37That was the first time it occurred to me that my children's education might have a different purpose than mine did.
00:28:43Who would do that? Someone from the Middle Ages or someone from the Renaissance?
00:28:46The world that we're preparing them for isn't going to require of them that they have to remember a bunch of information that someone tells them.
00:28:51The world's going to require for them to do stuff, to build things, to work on stuff.
00:28:55And that's what we're preparing them for.
00:28:58We could argue all we want about kids needing to stay in their seat and be quiet,
00:29:02but I don't know of any jobs that are going to exist, that even exist now, that require kids to stay in their seats and be quiet.
00:29:09Jason Levy is the principal of a middle school in New York's South Bronx.
00:29:14How you doing?
00:29:15Kids are going to need to be fluent in technology.
00:29:17They're going to need to be excellent at communication.
00:29:19They're going to need to be problem solvers.
00:29:21That's just the way the world is now.
00:29:23Four years ago, the school was on the verge of collapse.
00:29:27Kids were not being challenged.
00:29:30There were a lot of fights and arguments, a lot of gang activity.
00:29:34Only 9 percent of the students were meeting state standards in math.
00:29:40Walking through the hallways, it felt like at any moment chaos was going to break out.
00:29:46It felt like every day we were holding on with everything we could just to get through the day.
00:29:51How you guys doing?
00:29:52Levy took over the school in 2004, after a string of other principals had been unable to turn it around.
00:29:58Let's go.
00:29:59He had an ambitious idea.
00:30:01Hands off.
00:30:02Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.
00:30:03Jason said, my vision is to have all the students with laptops, do their homework online.
00:30:09I said, Jason, I've been doing this 25 years.
00:30:12You think this is possible?
00:30:13I think you're crazy.
00:30:14He said, no, this is going to happen.
00:30:16This is going to work here, Gina.
00:30:18Watch.
00:30:19Thank you very much.
00:30:20That was a good job.
00:30:21For me, there should never be a question as to whether or not students should have access to technology.
00:30:27Technology is like oxygen, you know, and no one would ever have an argument that we should take away the oxygen from the kids.
00:30:34I think, if anything, we make school make more sense for them when we provide them with opportunity to use technology.
00:30:43Please log in.
00:30:45The computer has been amazing.
00:30:47It's an email I sent called Monday Ning Project Tasks.
00:30:50Ning is a social networking site where you can make your own separate little network.
00:30:54And so I created Ning social networks for my students as characters for To Kill a Mockingbird.
00:31:00If you are Atticus, you're creating a discussion question.
00:31:03And they can write discussion questions.
00:31:05They can comment on each other's walls.
00:31:07They upload pictures.
00:31:08They write diary entries.
00:31:09They add music.
00:31:10They're finding jazz songs that I gave them, Billie Holiday songs to go with the time period.
00:31:14Yeah, that's fine.
00:31:15And it's amazing that these kids are getting so into it.
00:31:17Because I was really worried they wouldn't grasp the novel.
00:31:20Incidents of violence are way down.
00:31:24We track those things, and they've been decimated.
00:31:27Daily attendance is up over 90 percent.
00:31:30In test scores, we went up in reading 30 percent.
00:31:34And in math, almost 40 percent.
00:31:36You know, I wake up every day and I go to bed every night knowing that we're doing something right.
00:31:41Something is working here, undoubtedly.
00:31:45It feels like the kids' minds are being opened in a new way.
00:31:48They're hooked.
00:31:50But is there a catch to this?
00:31:52My concern with this digital media is that it's such short attention span stuff that they get bored.
00:32:00It's what I call instant gratification education.
00:32:05A thought comes to you, you pursue it.
00:32:07You see a website, you click on it.
00:32:09You want to hear music while you're studying, you do it.
00:32:12All this bifurcates the brain, keeps it from being able to pursue one linear thought,
00:32:19and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs.
00:32:25Can you hold on?
00:32:26The school is often battling the lures of online distractions.
00:32:29Its firewall blocks access to sites like YouTube and MySpace.
00:32:33But the kids figure out how to get to them anyway.
00:32:36Sometimes the teachers bore us, and instead of listening to them, go on the website.
00:32:41The teacher comes to something, they'll switch it so the teacher won't see them.
00:32:46It's mostly MySpace, AIM, and games, but at the same time doing all schoolwork.
00:32:51So I click, and there's an observe button, and it brings up their screen.
00:32:56The school's assistant principal spends part of each day remotely monitoring what the kids are doing on their laptops.
00:33:03We have a photo booth.
00:33:04He can see them, but they can't see him.
00:33:07These kids are goofing off, taking pictures of themselves in class.
00:33:11So wait, do all the kids have the cameras on?
00:33:14Sixth and seventh grade have cameras.
00:33:16A lot of kids are just on it to check their hair, do their makeup.
00:33:20They just use it like it's a mirror.
00:33:22I always like to mess with them and take a picture.
00:33:26Nine times out of ten, they duck out of the way.
00:33:30And then they shut down and they get right back to work.
00:33:32So I can see he's got a few things going on here.
00:33:36He's got the photo booth program open.
00:33:39He's got his social studies project open, school email open.
00:33:43You know, I think the kids know what is expected of them, but they also want to do all their other things.
00:33:50That's what I see a lot of is the multitasking.
00:33:53But I was doing my work too.
00:33:55Most of the adults at the school actually seemed pretty sanguine about the kids being so easily distracted.
00:34:01You learn something new every day.
00:34:03I think there's something to be said for multitasking.
00:34:05I think that teaching students to multitask is really important for their future jobs.
00:34:11We have to embrace the fact that our kids are going to need different skills five years from now than they needed five years ago.
00:34:18I think that the world has sped up in a lot of ways and I think education hasn't.
00:34:24Here in the Bronx, where most of the kids weren't engaged in school at all before,
00:34:29bringing in technology has clearly been a net gain.
00:34:33But what about the kids at MIT and the multitasking experiments at Stanford?
00:34:38At some point, does the increasing use of technology create diminishing returns?
00:34:43I never read books. I'll be honest. I can't remember the last time I read a book.
00:34:48Greg Bucato was a senior when we filmed him at Chatham High School several years ago.
00:34:53Nowadays, people are so busy that they need to get summaries of it, like spark notes.
00:34:58You can read the whole book in a matter of pages. So I read all online.
00:35:02I've actually never read, like, Romeo and Juliet, so I read it yesterday in five minutes.
00:35:08I mean, if there were 27 hours in a day, I'd read Hamlet. I really would, but it's only 24.
00:35:14You will find a lot of English professors saying, I can't assign a novel more than 200 pages.
00:35:20I used to. I can't anymore.
00:35:23Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation.
00:35:28It's filled with data suggesting that kids aren't as academically capable as they used to be,
00:35:33before all these digital distractions.
00:35:36What I would like more than anything else is for young people to prove every single harsh judgment in that book flat wrong, right?
00:35:44We want them to grow up and to blow us away with their literacies, their reading and writing skills,
00:35:50their knowledge about history and art, and their civic activity. But we just don't see it.
00:35:57Bauerlein quotes a 2007 NEA study that shows that while younger students' reading skills are improving,
00:36:05as kids get older and ostensibly more wired, their reading deteriorates.
00:36:10And he claims that writing skills are suffering, too.
00:36:13When the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors about basic skills,
00:36:21today, as compared to ten years ago, only six percent of them said that college students come into their classes
00:36:29very well prepared in writing.
00:36:32By a two-to-one margin, they said basic skills are worse today than they were a decade ago.
00:36:39You already hear professors and others talking about changes in the way kids write,
00:36:44so that instead of writing an essay, they write in paragraphs.
00:36:48They write a paragraph, and they say, oh, now look at Facebook for a while.
00:36:52Or they write a paragraph and say, oh, a chance to play poker or to do all of these at once.
00:36:57So what we're seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through
00:37:03and much more little bursts and snippets.
00:37:06The MIT students we met confirmed that constant interruptions have an effect on their writing.
00:37:12Like, we've talked to professors, not necessarily here, but who say that students of your generation
00:37:17write in paragraphs.
00:37:18In other words, there isn't this kind of connection between paragraphs.
00:37:21It's like the paragraphs are kind of separate.
00:37:23Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:37:24I love that all the time.
00:37:25All the time.
00:37:26All my papers, my first draft, it's always like, all right, paragraph one, awesome.
00:37:29Two, awesome.
00:37:30Three, awesome.
00:37:31I don't see the connection.
00:37:32And in my head, well, I was probably thinking about something else during then,
00:37:35or I wasn't looking at the big picture.
00:37:37It was short term, short term, short term.
00:37:39Let me write out an awesome paragraph and then go to the next one.
00:37:42My next idea.
00:37:43My kids are young and they all still read books.
00:37:55Kansas.
00:37:56Kansas.
00:37:57But will that stop being the case as they get more immersed in technology?
00:38:02To me, that seems like a pretty devastating loss.
00:38:05The reason a lot of people are stuck, I think, is because they confuse the old ways, the
00:38:11best ways of doing something once with the best ways of doing those things forever.
00:38:17So it's not that kids shouldn't learn to communicate.
00:38:20It's not that they shouldn't learn to express complex ideas.
00:38:23Of course, they should still learn all those things.
00:38:25Those are what we call the verbs.
00:38:28The nouns that they use, whether it's the essay or the paper or the writing or whatever
00:38:35it is, or whether it's the video or the podcast or the something, that's what changes.
00:38:41The learning may stay the same, but we invent new ways of teaching.
00:38:47And I don't know that the book, which was for a long period of time, but not that long, maybe
00:38:54a couple of centuries, the way that people did this, that was the primary way, is the best
00:39:00way in the 21st century.
00:39:06There's always gains and losses.
00:39:08You know, when print replaced oral culture, when writing happened, there are certainly
00:39:13things we lost.
00:39:14One of them was memory.
00:39:16You think of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
00:39:20The Homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of poetry out of their own memory.
00:39:28We're not good at that anymore because print took it away.
00:39:33Is it a loss?
00:39:34Sure.
00:39:35And to a certain extent, getting people to be contemplative and a little bit slower,
00:39:40not to multitask all the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time, to a
00:39:46certain extent might be lost.
00:39:48But that's the price of gain.
00:39:50Do you struggle with the issue of distraction personally?
00:39:53I don't know anyone on the planet who doesn't struggle with the issue of distraction personally.
00:39:58You get pulled in every direction today.
00:40:01But this is not a new issue.
00:40:04Go back and read descriptions of the progressive era walking down the streets in New York.
00:40:09And the sense of your eyes being pulled in every direction by the hubbub of the crowd.
00:40:15People described it as being electrocuted, you know, bolts of energy shooting through you from every direction.
00:40:24People as early as the 1960s were telling us we're moving to a reality of information overload.
00:40:30So the point is, this is a problem that we as human beings have coped with throughout most of the 20th century, into the 21st century.
00:40:39And the good news is, we survived it.
00:40:41As a culture, we learned how to adapt to it.
00:40:44So what we are seeing is a period of evolution.
00:40:47And at the end of the day, we're better off as a society if we go at this with a sense of open-mindedness and exploration.
00:40:57I'm on my computer 24-7.
00:41:03It's kind of sad, but it's also kind of a good thing that we should embrace the technology that we have.
00:41:08And we should be thankful for it.
00:41:10I was in the library with my Blackberry.
00:41:13I had my laptop.
00:41:14On Frontline's Digital Nation website, hundreds of people have submitted their own stories about how the net has impacted their lives.
00:41:21She said, you know what, this is really sad.
00:41:23We're supposed to be on vacation and we're just totally wired.
00:41:26There are stories of parenting in the digital age.
00:41:29My son learned to read through gaming.
00:41:32My kids can do four or five functions concurrently and never even break a sweat.
00:41:37Of personal transformation.
00:41:39I went from a carbaholic couch potato to a cyber crusading warrior princess.
00:41:45I deleted her.
00:41:47I deleted her sister.
00:41:48Stories of romance.
00:41:50I deleted her three best friends.
00:41:53And struggles with privacy.
00:41:55I ended up taking it down, but now I sort of feel like I have to censor sometimes what I say with my family.
00:42:02Whereas before, like, the minute that I felt something, I would just type it out.
00:42:06But now that I know that, like, people are watching me.
00:42:09So check this one out.
00:42:10But one of the most irresistible stories was this one.
00:42:13Let me tell you this.
00:42:14I never knew what blogging was or Twitter or any of these fancy names.
00:42:19Do you know I'm becoming an expert?
00:42:22It turned out that an 83-year-old woman and her grandson have a hit online cooking show called Feed Me Bubby.
00:42:29Bubby, what's today's English word?
00:42:31Today's word is Bubby, meaning grandmother.
00:42:34Bubby cooks and her grandson, Avram, does everything else.
00:42:39Hi.
00:42:40Hello, Rachel and Doug.
00:42:42Welcome to my home.
00:42:43Shalom.
00:42:44Come in.
00:42:46Come into my favorite spot, the kitchen.
00:42:52Are you hungry?
00:42:53Do you want to eat?
00:42:55Let's just tuna fish with a little bit of mayo.
00:42:58And then roll it up carefully.
00:43:01Thank you, Bubby.
00:43:03You know, I worked until I was 73.
00:43:06I worked for a bank.
00:43:08And all of a sudden this came along.
00:43:10And now I'm too busy.
00:43:12The internet really, I have to say, added years to Bubby's life.
00:43:17I think these days it's important for any age.
00:43:22I mean, it's growing, it's changing so fast that if you don't keep up with it a little bit, you're really left behind.
00:43:29Do you sometimes feel bad for kids being raised in an internet era?
00:43:34That they depend so much on the digital for their sense of connection to other people?
00:43:41They grew up with it.
00:43:42To them it's like second nature.
00:43:44And it's easier for my grandchildren to go into email.
00:43:47I get angry sometimes at them.
00:43:49I said, you know, I'd like to hear your voice.
00:43:51I know your email.
00:43:52Yeah, they'll sit down and they'll type out email and it's wonderful.
00:43:55But call me on the telephone.
00:43:58Ready to answer some emails?
00:43:59Yep.
00:44:00Okay.
00:44:01Every time I read your recipes I think about my mother.
00:44:05I miss her.
00:44:07There's something missing that they have to pour their heart out to me.
00:44:11Oh, she's writing about the jelly jammies.
00:44:13Their memories, their feelings, their weaknesses.
00:44:18What do you want to say to Charlotte?
00:44:20Please let me know how you make out.
00:44:25Signed, Bubby.
00:44:28It's, I don't know, a little bit of loneliness.
00:44:31There's something there that I feel that Bubby fills the gap.
00:44:36That video fills the gap.
00:44:38Please keep in touch.
00:44:40Bubby uses the net to help simulate a sense of connection
00:44:44that people had with their own grandmothers.
00:44:47But it's just a baby step.
00:44:49I mean, nobody gets to go to Bubby's kitchen in the flesh.
00:44:52Not yet, anyway.
00:44:54But there are people who are nonetheless reaching through to the other side of the screen,
00:44:59trying to inhabit the net as if it were a real place.
00:45:02World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game that brings millions of people from around the world into the same virtual universe.
00:45:23In this case, a land of dragons, elves, and orcs, called Azeroth.
00:45:34Azeroth has three continents to explore in almost infinite detail.
00:45:38Players travel at skies, seas, forests, and deserts on everything from mechanical birds to griffins.
00:45:49When you're playing a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft, you're having experiences that you could never have had in the real world.
00:45:56Games do give people a powerful, vicarious life.
00:46:01When you think about it, for most of human time on Earth, you couldn't be any different than you were born.
00:46:06If you were born a peasant, that was it.
00:46:08If I came along to that guy and said, you know, you're going to be a peasant for all your life,
00:46:13but I got this world you can enter where you can be a king, who wouldn't have played it?
00:46:18I have one going in three, two, one, and come.
00:46:27That element of fantasy, that element of imagination, is incredibly powerful.
00:46:33You are fully immersed in a world that's telling you a kind of story.
00:46:39We often get this when we watch a film or we read a book that we're really interested in.
00:46:44But games seem to do it even more.
00:46:48I think because games create this kind of immersive world that you step into.
00:46:54And that's powerful.
00:46:56You know, that's kind of weird. They've told without everything else.
00:47:00And you actually have a really hard problem to work on.
00:47:04And other people there to help work on it.
00:47:06They shouldn't be linked.
00:47:10Alan lives in New York and is a member of a guild.
00:47:13Probably because I took flirting text out.
00:47:15A group of players that work together to fight off monsters, attack enemy outposts, and have adventures.
00:47:23This guild raids, on average, four evenings a week.
00:47:27I need to hug my boy goodnight. I'll be right back.
00:47:33Windrider, Orcs, Sawmen, Windspear Clan, Horde.
00:47:36Many of these people never actually meet each other in person.
00:47:40Unless they travel to one of the annual fan conventions sponsored by the gaming companies.
00:47:44I told you you'd be here.
00:47:45Yes, I am.
00:47:47But they say they consider each other close friends.
00:47:50We talk four times a week because we meet online.
00:47:54So we recognize everyone's voices and we're just getting used to faces now.
00:47:58Yeah, we have members as far away as New Zealand.
00:48:01Last summer, we followed Alan and his wife Liza out to California,
00:48:05where every year Blizzard Entertainment throws a giant party for its fans.
00:48:10Oh my god.
00:48:11We're all playing the games.
00:48:12Sure, games like Warcraft aren't for everyone.
00:48:26But the number and variety of people here was impressive.
00:48:29This is basically your PC bong US style. They get it once a year.
00:48:35America's enthusiasm for this genre may not be quite as widespread as it is in Korea.
00:48:40But it also seems to be fueled by a somewhat different desire.
00:48:44The urge to connect to other people.
00:48:47We've all spent hundreds of hours together.
00:48:49My traditional style friends who I have outside the game,
00:48:52none of them do I spend 16 hours a week with, week in and week out.
00:48:56I mean, I've known some of these folks for years.
00:48:59People who do not game and do not have the experience
00:49:02don't understand the friendships, the connections,
00:49:05and how close you can get to someone that you've never seen.
00:49:09But just like the gamers in Korea,
00:49:11a sizable number of American players struggle with compulsive gaming.
00:49:16The first hour, I was hooked.
00:49:18I was immediately immersed in this world.
00:49:21Of course, completely made up, but it was so striking
00:49:24and I could not stop playing at all.
00:49:27I would play literally non-stop.
00:49:30I got so into World of Warcraft that I was getting up at about 9 or 10 in the morning
00:49:36and I'd play straight through the day
00:49:38and I wouldn't log off until about 1 or 2 in the morning.
00:49:41I even kind of quit my job
00:49:43because I really didn't want to do anything other than playing World of Warcraft.
00:49:47The average amount of time people spend in Warcraft is nearly 10 hours a week.
00:49:53But many people spend much, much more.
00:49:58The fantasy role-playing game EverQuest is just as compelling.
00:50:02And she fell.
00:50:03Oh, I've talked with you.
00:50:05Oh, you're Nicholas.
00:50:06I'm Nicholas.
00:50:07How do you guys all know each other?
00:50:11Met through the game.
00:50:12All online.
00:50:13We had never met before we came down here to Las Vegas.
00:50:17This is the most fun I've ever had in my life.
00:50:19I'm closer to my online friends than anybody in real life.
00:50:23Yeah, pretty much.
00:50:24Definitely.
00:50:25Oh, let's hear it.
00:50:27Of course.
00:50:28The relationships people forge in these games
00:50:30seem to have a particularly intense quality.
00:50:33Nice to meet you.
00:50:34It's not uncommon for in-game romances to migrate to real life,
00:50:39even lead to marriage.
00:50:41They met in World of Warcraft.
00:50:43And now we're married.
00:50:44We're now married.
00:50:45Evidently, almost a third of female players
00:50:48have met a romantic partner inside the game.
00:50:52You know, we went out and had dates in real life.
00:50:55But to me, I'm always going to consider my first date,
00:50:59the time when he broke into a castle to come meet me.
00:51:05I just thought it was so romantic.
00:51:08We still play together.
00:51:09We have our computers in the same room
00:51:11so we can talk to each other.
00:51:12We sit back and back.
00:51:14Play the games and strategize, yeah.
00:51:16I knew better than to assume that all gamers were antisocial geeks.
00:51:20But I was still surprised by just how deeply connected
00:51:23these people seemed to be to each other.
00:51:26The technology wasn't isolating them.
00:51:28It was giving them a new way to be intimate.
00:51:33Maybe virtual worlds do offer humans
00:51:35the chance to go and do something altogether new.
00:51:38I remember from the time I was young, always wondering,
00:51:49well, is there more than this?
00:51:51You know, whenever I'd do anything,
00:51:53I'd always kind of have this question in the back of my mind,
00:51:55saying, well, does it get better than this?
00:51:57Does it get better?
00:51:59This is beautiful now. This is awesome.
00:52:02Yeah.
00:52:03In fact, I remember a great aphorism that said,
00:52:06imagine the world as good as you can imagine it,
00:52:09and then know one thing.
00:52:10God has imagined it better than you.
00:52:13And that always made me think, oh, really?
00:52:22When Philip Rosedale created Second Life,
00:52:24he insisted it was not a game.
00:52:26It was a new reality.
00:52:33If you ask the question,
00:52:34what does the virtual world look like?
00:52:36It looks like the average of all the things we dream about.
00:52:44It's a place where you can become someone new,
00:52:46and it's a place where you can create and discover things
00:52:49that you couldn't possibly imagine
00:52:51or have ever seen here on Earth.
00:52:54Why can't I fly?
00:52:55I thought page up is fly.
00:52:57I thought page up is fly.
00:52:58Second Life is an immersive 3D online universe.
00:53:04You make a character called an avatar,
00:53:07and then you live in that world as that person.
00:53:14Avatars in Second Life can do most anything real people do.
00:53:17purchase real estate, hold rock concerts, give seminars, create art, and make money.
00:53:26For a while, companies like Coke and Calvin Klein, thinking Second Life would be the next big thing,
00:53:32opened virtual outposts there.
00:53:34It didn't work.
00:53:36Marketing real goods in virtual worlds never really took off.
00:53:39But Rosedale says that creating a viable marketplace was never his point.
00:53:48He wanted something else, to rewrite the rules of interaction between human beings.
00:53:54I think that our society today, you know, we're alienated from each other and from the world around us.
00:54:01When people come together in a virtual world, we immediately become more social and more connected and more dependent on each other.
00:54:09And I think that when people go into virtual worlds, the sense of being physically near each other
00:54:13causes them to behave much better than they do, say, in email or instant messaging.
00:54:18And that's an interesting phenomenon.
00:54:21Rosedale holds up his own workplace as a model for this more intimate, more tender online culture.
00:54:28So, you know, we all do sit open without any cubicles or anything here.
00:54:34He's instituted something called the love machine,
00:54:37through which his employees send each other messages of encouragement online.
00:54:41And we use it as a performance.
00:54:43Like, it's how we track how we're all doing.
00:54:46They often hold their meetings around campfires or on sandy beaches in Second Life,
00:54:51even when they're sitting across the office from each other.
00:54:54This is my desk.
00:54:56There's not a whole lot to our real spaces anymore.
00:54:59Right.
00:55:00You know, all the big stuff is virtual.
00:55:02My office in the virtual world is much cooler than this.
00:55:05It's a big glass room with room for, like, ten people to sit down and talk at the same time.
00:55:11There's no phone rings.
00:55:12Yeah, there's really...
00:55:14You know, nobody uses phones anymore.
00:55:16What struck me most about Rosedale was his confidence that he could solve the alienation
00:55:22modern technology has helped to create with more technology.
00:55:26Technology over the last, say, 50 years has mostly separated us.
00:55:32You know, we've gone from watching movies together to watching them in living rooms to watching them on iPods.
00:55:36Went up in a few minutes.
00:55:37And I think that the technology is now actually starting to bring us back together again.
00:55:41Yeah, I think that's the right approach.
00:55:43Yeah.
00:55:44Does everybody agree?
00:55:45One of the things that's unique about virtual reality is that, unlike the internet, you're not alone anymore.
00:55:53I mean, he's got a point, at least in a way.
00:55:56We are all together out on the internet alone.
00:56:00Or alone out on the internet together, right?
00:56:04I mean, do virtual worlds really bring us together with others?
00:56:09Or do they just make being utterly alone a little more bearable?
00:56:15Hi, everybody.
00:56:18Very happy all of you managed to join us.
00:56:21We're going to teach you how to move around, how to walk around without bumping into people.
00:56:26These IBM employees are getting their first lesson in how to use Second Life.
00:56:31The goal is to basically use this tool on a day-to-day basis to make it as easy for you to collaborate with people in India and in China.
00:56:39The company is in the process of shifting many of its internal meetings into virtual worlds.
00:56:44And hopefully make it almost as natural.
00:56:48We're just putting the metrics in place.
00:56:50But we estimate that for all the meetings that we ran last year, we saved more than a million dollars.
00:56:56Just by not flying to meetings.
00:56:58So click the fly button.
00:57:00And what you'll notice is that you'll hover up in the air.
00:57:02And once you're in that hovering position, that means you're all ready to fly.
00:57:05Very good, Scott.
00:57:10Anybody else?
00:57:11Don't be afraid.
00:57:12How do I get down?
00:57:14But as big an incentive as saving money on travel is the idea that virtual worlds might recapture the human connection lost in a culture of video conferencing and phone calls.
00:57:26Does that make sense?
00:57:27OK.
00:57:28Sounds good.
00:57:29All right.
00:57:30Let's head over there.
00:57:31OK.
00:57:32This technology will make it possible for me to work from home, but still introduce this notion of being able to meet people and be much more in the old workplace environment,
00:57:44where in fact you did have a team around you that you would meet face to face and you'd have ad hoc meetings.
00:57:51You know, you go, OK, let's go to this conference room.
00:57:53Let's have a cup of coffee.
00:57:54You can almost do that virtually while a lot of us are working remotely.
00:57:59Hey, Fran, it's me.
00:58:02I just don't have my agenda in front of me, so can you just read it to me? Let me know what's up.
00:58:08Françoise Liguesse lives with her husband, who also works for IBM, and their two dogs in New York's Hudson Valley, about half an hour's drive from the office.
00:58:18They did it in Second Life, didn't they?
00:58:21So how did it go?
00:58:23I work from home maybe three days a week.
00:58:26Well, that's great, actually.
00:58:27So I could be in my office, but I'd be on the phone anyway.
00:58:31Why don't we stand up and have this conversation?
00:58:33OK, so...
00:58:34Or we can go sit in some of the chairs.
00:58:36Oh, there are tables behind there?
00:58:37Yeah, behind us.
00:58:38I need to get better clothes for these meetings, because, you know, what I'm wearing first is boring, and I'm wearing the same thing as Margot, and that just won't do.
00:58:46I agree, I want my glasses back. I'll tell you, I can't see anything in this room.
00:58:52This immersive environment that the 3D Internet gives us is much more engaging, much more human in a way.
00:59:00This is something that is going to change the way people communicate, because it really does feel real.
00:59:08Thank you, everybody, for joining from wherever you are.
00:59:16IBM built this office park in Westchester, New York, in the late 1980s, as a hub for thousands of employees.
00:59:32But today, the place is like a ghost town.
00:59:37It's as if no one actually works here.
00:59:40They planned this place as an industrial-age company, where people would actually come to work in their cars and park, go into offices.
00:59:50And now, basically, everybody's either at home or in hotels or God knows where, logging in through their machines.
00:59:56It's not that IBM let everybody go, right? It's that everybody's just not here.
01:00:03Yeah, why don't you come over and sit down in the seat so we can see you? I feel like I'm all alone here.
01:00:18Could you tell us where you all are? Where you're coming into this room from in real space?
01:00:25Like, where do you really live, I guess, is the question.
01:00:28So, hi, this is Julie, based out of Burlington, Vermont.
01:00:31Hi, this is Jochen. I'm living in Burblingen, Germany.
01:00:35Hi, this is Arthur. I'm from Campinas, a city near Sao Paulo in Brazil.
01:00:41I mean, you've all met in real life at one point or another, right?
01:00:44Actually, no. None of us have.
01:00:46No. Nope.
01:00:47But you're, you're, this is your main team, right?
01:00:51Yeah, actually, you know, we meet here every day, so this is how we know each other.
01:01:03As more of our real lives migrate to virtual spaces, there's a growing market for research exploring how we behave inside those spaces,
01:01:12as well as how our virtual experiences change us.
01:01:15And so we use computer algorithms to do it automatically.
01:01:18This is a subject who's in the midst of an experiment right now.
01:01:21She's wearing a head-mounted display that shows what you're seeing here.
01:01:25Jeremy Balenson runs the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford.
01:01:29She's actually seeing depth in stereo. You can see that candy coming right into her mouth.
01:01:34His research shows how the distinctions between real and virtual are becoming blurred, even interchangeable.
01:01:41Subjects would report afterwards being sick, being full.
01:01:45It's a subject of intense interest right now to the government, marketers, even the military, all of whom fund his work.
01:01:53We're not wired to differentiate experiences like this one from actual eating, meaning digital stuff is such a new phenomenon
01:02:00that if it looks real and it feels real, the brain tells us it's real.
01:02:04And the identification gets even more profound when our avatars wear our real-life faces.
01:02:10So you're not smiling.
01:02:14Balenson was able to build an avatar that looked just like me in about 15 minutes.
01:02:19So now we've built Virtual Doug. I can have him say anything I want.
01:02:25And that's when the real fun begins.
01:02:28In one study, we made you 10 centimeters taller than you actually were and had you conduct a negotiation with someone.
01:02:35Having 10 centimeters difference in height from your normal self causes you to be three times more likely to beat someone else in a negotiation in virtual reality.
01:02:44And Balenson found that advantage persists even after you leave the virtual world.
01:02:50Regardless of our actual height, you'll then beat me face-to-face when we have a negotiation.
01:02:55So this stunned us.
01:02:57A small exposure inside virtual reality carried over to their behavior face-to-face.
01:03:02All righty-all, your grandparents are going to leave for a little bit.
01:03:05But Balenson's most stunning research involved kids.
01:03:08He calls it the swimming with whales experiment.
01:03:12Okay.
01:03:13Well, I heard a little earlier that when you were three years old, two years ago, you swam with two black and white fish named Fudgy and Buddy.
01:03:21Do you remember swimming with the black and white fish Fudgy and Buddy?
01:03:24No, you don't remember anything so much?
01:03:26We've done studies with children.
01:03:28When they see themselves swimming around with whales in virtual reality, a week later, half of them will believe that they'd swam with whales.
01:03:35Kids actually believe that they've done this?
01:03:37Absolutely.
01:03:38About 50% of them will believe that in physical space, they actually went to SeaWorld and swam with whales.
01:03:44Does that freak you out a little bit?
01:03:47You know, people always ask me.
01:03:48A lot of the stuff that we do in the lab says that virtual experiences can profoundly affect you in wonderful and not-so-wonderful ways.
01:03:55These experiences are happening, and the world is rushing like a freight train towards digital stuff.
01:04:01I just see it as where we're going.
01:04:06Undoubtedly, it is where we are going.
01:04:10And at the leading edge is the U.S. military.
01:04:15Currently, they're using computer simulations to treat troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:04:23Sergeant Gerald De La Sala did a year's tour in Iraq and is now being treated with virtual reality therapy at the Manhattan VA, one of over 40 centers around the country piloting the program.
01:04:36That kind of pushed my stress level recently, just with that last one to six.
01:04:44It's still in clinical trials, but early results are encouraging.
01:04:49Under certain circumstances, their whole posture will change.
01:04:52They're leaning forward and they've got that gun, and you can see something's happening to them emotionally at that point.
01:04:58That person on the bridge was firing. We're firing back at them.
01:05:13An ambush fire came around, and we basically continued through it.
01:05:19Anxiety rating. It's a five.
01:05:22Over time, their brain is able to say,
01:05:24OK, this is uncomfortable, this is unpleasant, but it's not a life-threatening situation.
01:05:29I can tone down the level of anxiety and stress.
01:05:32Anxiety rating. It's good.
01:05:35One. Good work today, Jerry.
01:05:38Technology is wrapped up in the story of war.
01:05:42Ready?
01:05:46You know, look at all the things that surround us.
01:05:48Everything from the internet to jet engines, these are all things where the military has been a driver for technology.
01:05:58Contact fraud!
01:05:59Contact fraud, all right.
01:06:00And technology opens up new frontiers, new directions we can go in.
01:06:05Clear?
01:06:06Everything clear, everything clear.
01:06:07But it also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer.
01:06:11Yeah, it's rally from deadly. I look like we might be taking fire at this time.
01:06:15One of those questions is what it means to wage a war when one side is on a physical battlefield and the other on a virtual one.
01:06:23Coming down to the ground. Thank you.
01:06:25From air-conditioned rooms on this Air Force base in the desert outside Las Vegas,
01:06:30pilots fly unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, that execute missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
01:06:36Other aircraft, airspace altitude.
01:06:40All right, looks like we're by ourselves out here in 63 Bravo High.
01:06:46Airmen here are required to wear flight suits to work, even though they sit 7,500 miles away from the battlefield.
01:06:54It's one way of reminding these men that they're fighting a real war.
01:07:06Every so often you have technologies that come along that rewrite the rules of the game.
01:07:11Yet we don't talk about it because it's costless to us.
01:07:23Drones have the capacity to strike with extraordinary precision and at no cost to American lives.
01:07:29The number of drones has multiplied in recent years, and the Pentagon is clamoring for more.
01:07:41The risks are all one way.
01:07:43In today's wars, right now, the pilot gets to do all the shooting and never gets shot at.
01:07:51And that creates a very different attitude than somebody who is both dealing out risk and is accepting risk.
01:08:01The biggest risk that we accept is that feeling of detachment from the aircraft.
01:08:11You need to be able to think through a three-dimensional problem that's located 7,500 miles away from you.
01:08:17Real live aircraft, real live weapons, doing a real mission.
01:08:21I try to ensure that people understand there are people who are counting on us to do the mission.
01:08:25You can fly in Afghanistan one day, and the very next day you're flying in Iraq.
01:08:30Though they're physically located here, they need to think in their mind that they are in theater
01:08:35because that's where the business end of that cockpit is.
01:08:39You're no longer sitting at Creech Air Force Base.
01:08:42Get in that mindset.
01:08:44When you step into the GCS, you are in the fight.
01:08:46And Viper from Deadly have a single individual on the roof on the north corner of that four-sided building.
01:08:56The plane's cameras can surveil their targets from up to nine miles overhead.
01:09:01And it looks like he may be employing weapons at this time.
01:09:04One time, we had intel that, you know, there's a bad guy riding around on a motorcycle, if you will.
01:09:09And he's just riding around, and he's stopped at two or three different playgrounds,
01:09:12and he's playing soccer with all these kids, you know,
01:09:15and he's just, he's living his life, and he's just doing his normal everyday life.
01:09:19And then, you know, sure enough, at the end of that ride, though,
01:09:21we found him at a meeting of bad people.
01:09:24And it ended up resulting in a strike, so you end up seeing what happens.
01:09:28Got any copies of that? We've got eyes on them.
01:09:310-5, rifle, time of flight, 15 seconds.
01:09:39That's 10 seconds.
01:09:42They do take a lot of care about civilian casualties.
01:09:53It is very much on their mind.
01:09:55But there's no way for them to really tell.
01:10:00All they see is the bomb going into that building and it blowing up.
01:10:04They don't necessarily see what happens afterwards.
01:10:07A drone can't dig through the rubble and see what the consequences of that Hellfire missile was.
01:10:13They can't.
01:10:18Estimates vary as to the number of civilians killed in airstrikes in Afghanistan.
01:10:22And the U.S. and NATO forces don't publicly differentiate between manned and unmanned strikes
01:10:28in tracking civilian casualties.
01:10:33We asked one of the pilots about it.
01:10:36Um, yeah. I mean, everybody worries about things.
01:10:40All you can do is, uh, you can make sure that you're prepared.
01:10:46So, you don't think you've ever hit someone you haven't intended to hit?
01:10:50Uh, no. I, uh, no.
01:10:55In the morning when I come to work, I pray. I pray for strength.
01:11:01That God gives me strength. That He gives me wisdom.
01:11:07And if my focus is on God, then everything else in my life, I've found, falls into place. So...
01:11:20Going to war has meant the same thing for over 5,000 years.
01:11:24Going to war meant that you were going to a place where there was such danger that you might never come home again.
01:11:29You might never see your family again.
01:11:31Now compare that experience to that of a Predator drone pilot.
01:11:35You're sitting behind a computer screen. You're shooting missiles at enemy targets. You're killing enemy combatants.
01:11:42And then, at the end of the day, you get back in your car.
01:11:45And 20 minutes later, you're at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.
01:11:50Hey, guys! Daddy! Hi!
01:11:57You know, your family is not going to totally understand. You can't explain everything to them.
01:12:02That's a challenge in the job that you've got to do that day in and day out.
01:12:06This disconnect of being at war and at home is very tough for the human mind to wrap itself around.
01:12:14And we're finding that some of these drone pilots actually have combat stress and PTSD even, just like the units physically deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan.
01:12:31To unwind, airmen stationed at the base come here to hang out and play video games.
01:12:37Our younger folks definitely have skill sets that some of the older guys, like me, didn't have the luxury of.
01:12:46They're definitely a technology generation. They already understand computers. It's almost intuitive for them.
01:12:54Last year, the Air Force trained the first class of drone pilots who weren't required to have any previous flying experience.
01:13:02You know, do you need to do 100 push-ups if your job is to sit on your butt all day and program or watch a camera from 4,000 miles away?
01:13:22Do you necessarily need the same skills?
01:13:24You know, maybe you just need to be a good hacker and have a big butt so you can sit in a chair all day.
01:13:32Excuse me? Can I get an Xbox 360 controller, please?
01:13:35In 2008, the Army closed five recruiting centers in the Philadelphia area and replaced them with this.
01:13:42How old are you? 14.
01:13:44The $13 million, 14-and-a-half-thousand-square-foot Army Experience Center.
01:13:50Die!
01:13:51Here, kids 13 and up can play on one of dozens of Xboxes and PC gaming stations for free.
01:13:58They are simulated rifles. They are not real rifles.
01:14:00Recruiters mill about.
01:14:01Are you cheating?
01:14:02They can't recruit kids under 17, but they're encouraged to chat with them and answer their questions.
01:14:07Did you just sign up for our tournaments?
01:14:09I've done them before.
01:14:10Did you win?
01:14:11I won, like, two.
01:14:12You won two? I think he's the best, man.
01:14:15It's a soft sell, a 21st century approach to recruiting, modeled in part on the Apple store.
01:14:22Here in the Army Experience Center, it's not the whole Army. It's not completely, you know, video games are never going to replicate the real thing.
01:14:29But it is a sampling experience to pique your interest and maybe encourage you to go learn more, just as Apple's trying to do.
01:14:36Let's go kill them!
01:14:38We have what young Americans want and they like.
01:14:40Let's go find them and kill them!
01:14:41They like video games, and that's why we're here.
01:14:44Yeah!
01:14:45Look, the military understands that if it can't embrace today's digital youth, they are never going to recruit the kind of soldiers and the kind of airmen and the kind of Marines that they need to have for the next century.
01:15:04Next to the gaming stations, the Army's built life-size simulators of Humvees and helicopters.
01:15:10Critics say that by placing these intense simulations of war in a recruiting environment, the Army is using the adrenaline rush to encourage kids to join up.
01:15:25Ah, man.
01:15:28I've never seen a place like this before, so it caught my attention.
01:15:31I thought it was amazing.
01:15:35I came in for the two days to play video games, and I was like, I got to do something more than just play video games.
01:15:41So I talked to one of the recruiters, signed up for the Army, left in two weeks, don't regret my decision since.
01:15:50Shame, shame, shame! War is not a game!
01:15:54Protesters accuse the Army of blurring the lines between game and reality, virtual war and real war.
01:16:00I'm a mother of a 13-year-old boy who absolutely loves video games, and I was really shocked that this is a recruitment tool that's being used by the military.
01:16:10I mean, there is no reset button in war.
01:16:13This is your third and final warning.
01:16:15Shut it down!
01:16:18Shut it down!
01:16:20Shut it down!
01:16:21It's not a game!
01:16:22Certainly video games are not like warfare.
01:16:26I think most kids are smart enough to understand that.
01:16:31You know, what's going on in Iraq is not virtual reality.
01:16:36We asked some of the kids about that.
01:16:39I really don't get confused.
01:16:41You know, it's just all fictional.
01:16:44I killed you!
01:16:45I mean, it's fun, but it's something like a real thing.
01:16:48Ooh, no way!
01:16:50You got sniped.
01:16:51I like it now.
01:16:52It's a video game.
01:16:54It doesn't make anybody want to shoot anybody, I don't think.
01:16:58Never did for me or any of my friends.
01:17:00Like, I don't think it's real.
01:17:02I don't think that that makes me want to go out there and do combat any more than anything else does.
01:17:09People talk about this distinction between a virtual world and the real world, and there's concern that there is an inability on the part of young people to separate the two.
01:17:19I actually think that that distinction is a very adult idea, an idea that has come from a generation of people where virtual didn't exist, and it was something new that was then added to the real world.
01:17:32But kids have that ability to move kind of seamlessly between the digital and the real.
01:17:38Where's your controller?
01:17:39Katie Salen writes about the theory and design behind video games.
01:17:43Who has a theory about why this controller...
01:17:45She's so convinced of the value of these games for kids that she helped create a New York City public school organized around them.
01:17:53This is not an ordinary school. It's something new. The school is all about how we learn through games.
01:18:02Okay, so go to game labels.
01:18:04That's what we did last time.
01:18:05I know there's bugs in this program, aren't there?
01:18:08Yes, I know.
01:18:09It's a radical model, using gaming as a lens for the entire curriculum, from geography to physics.
01:18:15I am a pair of forces that are equal and opposite. You have one minute.
01:18:21Games get us an incredibly engaging learning experience.
01:18:25Often there's a comparison made between a kind of older culture of kids reading books, and the ability to sit down and get through a 400-page novel,
01:18:34and the fact that kids today are playing video games, which people think means they have attention deficit disorder,
01:18:40that they're not really doing things in a very deep way, but that actually isn't the case.
01:18:47When kids are playing games, they are engaged in a way that's incredibly similar to when they're engaged in reading a book.
01:18:54And that game world is equally rich, I would argue, to many novels.
01:19:00What it comes down to, if you can't engage that kid in wanting to learn something, you really have a problem on your hands.
01:19:09Not everyone agrees with her.
01:19:12You'd see schools where they say, look, kids are different, they come in today different.
01:19:16We have to play with them, otherwise we'll lose them.
01:19:19We have to meet them on their own terms.
01:19:21It's complete hogwash.
01:19:23We've got to slow down and stop.
01:19:25And schools are one of the few institutions we have in our society where you can have a sustained conversation about something,
01:19:34without being bombarded and distracted by all these machines.
01:19:38We have to protect that.
01:19:41It may be too early to know the answer.
01:19:44We grew up in a world anchored in pages you turn.
01:19:49Maybe there's something these kids are getting that we aren't sure how to value yet.
01:19:54I'm going to need one more.
01:19:56And we'll just give him some more.
01:19:57Oh, he's out there.
01:19:58Yes!
01:19:59You know, there were people who complained when we moved from horses to cars.
01:20:03There were people who complained when we moved from letters to the telephone.
01:20:07And it's not that they're wrong totally, because things get lost.
01:20:11See, you might have less memory.
01:20:13We don't have as flowery writing.
01:20:15But we gain other things.
01:20:17And life moves on.
01:20:22And as we move on, I wonder what we'll hold on to.
01:20:26And what we'll end up leaving behind.
01:20:28Technology challenges us to assert our human values.
01:20:34Which means that, first of all, we have to figure out what they are.
01:20:38And that's not so easy.
01:20:40Technology isn't good or bad.
01:20:43It's powerful.
01:20:46And it's complicated.
01:20:48Take advantage of what it can do.
01:20:50Learn what it can do.
01:20:51But also ask, what is it doing to us?
01:20:55We're going to slowly, slowly find our balance.
01:20:59But I think it's going to take time.
01:21:02These are your students.
01:21:04Yeah, although sometimes I feel more like I'm their student.
01:21:09Digital technology continues to extend into every area of our lives.
01:21:14Yet the people developing these tools seem to be doing so with less regard for how we'll be affected in the future than how we might be influenced in the present.
01:21:24But when you stand back and just look a while, it becomes clear that people will take almost any technology and use it to express themselves.
01:21:34I mean, a lot of these projects are trying to help people gain some perspective.
01:21:38To find other people.
01:21:40That's cool.
01:21:41To remake the world on their own terms.
01:21:43So I guess that means you can still count me among the believers.
01:21:55I love the possibilities of a digital life.
01:21:58I love being able to experience the world through other people's eyes.
01:22:02I love being able to broadcast a story across the country from home in my underpants.
01:22:09I love being able to imagine almost any possible future.
01:22:14And to do so with other people.
01:22:16Millions of them.
01:22:17Right alongside me.
01:22:19But most of all, I love being able to turn it off.
01:22:23This report continues on Frontline's website.
01:22:36I love the internet.
01:22:38I'm learning more and more.
01:22:39Watch more of the personal stories from hundreds of contributors.
01:22:42I can't remember a line.
01:22:43Great, I just go online and there it is in front of me.
01:22:46There was a massive power outage.
01:22:48Just being without the juice, we actually talked to each other.
01:22:52And please send us your stories.
01:22:54Even though you could technically call me a digital native, I try to be relatively tech-free.
01:22:58Dive into a year's worth of reporting on digital life.
01:23:01Philip clearly had a vision from the beginning.
01:23:05Read extended interviews.
01:23:07The point of it is to be our most creative selves.
01:23:10If you can't engage that kid in wanting to learn something...
01:23:14Check out Douglas Rushkoff's ongoing conversations with experts and the public.
01:23:19Watch the program online and join the discussion at pbs.org.
01:23:34Next time on Frontline, how inexperienced pilots...
01:23:39They wanted to find a way of getting rid of that expensive employee.
01:23:42...and cutting corners on safety...
01:23:44If we didn't move those airplanes, they didn't make any money.
01:23:47...and inadequate regulation...
01:23:49The FAA protects airlines.
01:23:51...led to a tragic crash...
01:23:53...that exposed the risks...
01:23:55There are no survivors.
01:23:57...of flying cheap.
01:23:58Watch Frontline.
01:23:59Frontline Digital Nation is available on DVD.
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01:24:17Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
01:24:47With major funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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01:24:59Major funding for Digital Nation.
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01:25:06Empowering educators, parents, and students with innovative tools and resources to navigate in a broadband world.
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01:25:16This is PBS.
01:25:33This is PBS.
01:25:35This is PBS.
01:25:38To learn more about Captain America.
01:25:40If you're a member of the