Tag Archives: Covid19

On My Mind

What We Lose with Digital Communication

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Houseparty. Zoom. Skype. FaceTime. Google Meet. Etc.

Indeed, there are myriad ways to remotely connect with others. Doing so is important in a world that does not find most of us living together in groups of extended family or friends. The current global pandemic response to Covid-19 is requiring us to rethink how we maintain our social relationships, particularly those that were previously largely restricted to the domain of face-to-face communication. Those relationships have now either gone by the wayside or have crossed into the realm of the relationships that were already largely digital.

We know that Covid-19 has turned the world on its head. This provides an important opportunity to delve into the influences digital technology has had, and will continue to have, on the ways that we communicate with others. Humans are social creatures who have evolved due to and on the basis of face-to-face relationships; digital communication is not that and we are not wired to communicate digitally.

This is not to say that digital communication cannot benefit nor facilitate interaction, but it does not have the same impact as a face-to-face conversation. While many might argue for its necessity, we also need to understand what digital communication can and cannot provide for its highly social users.

Neurological elements of conversation

Firstly, face-to-face communication allows for the full gamut of available stimuli to be processed by our brain. We have evolved to recognise micro-expressions and interpret body language and tone subconsciously and rapidly as part of what comprises communication. Recent psychology research, such as that of Joy Hirsch among many others, suggests that we mimic others’ gestures during verbal communication to enhance comprehension. Both congruence and incongruence between gestures and verbal communication act as social cues that then inform the subsequent interaction. Hirsch extends this research into trust, arguing that it is congruence between gestural and verbal communication that signals openness and trust.

Additional research suggests that face-to-face communication leads to activation of mirror neurons, which fire when we are performing a specific action and watch others do the same. This ability to recognise, process, and experience the mental states of others is one of the explanations that psychology can provide for the development of human empathy. Current research with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) has allowed researchers to look at areas of the brain that activate in relation to the self, to others, and in relation to a computer. When dealing with humans, the hormone oxytocin increases trust. The same response does not occur when dealing with a computer.

Unfortunately, the nature of digital communication allows so much scope for distraction, so much extraneous cognitive load, that achieving such a relationship is nigh impossible. The implications of this are obvious.

But there are other effects to consider.

Empathy

As social creatures, humans have evolved to step into the shoes of others (whom those others might be is a fun topic in evolutionary psychology research) and take action accordingly. Relationships require us to understand one another’s emotions and perspectives and most of us know that this is challenging at the best of times. What happens when digital communication removes the facial expressions, gestures, tone, and cadence that we rely on to understand the meaning behind what others are saying? Additionally, what happens if we have not actually developed the ability to interpret these complex, nuanced cues as a result of the depth to which we have adopted digital communication?

Research suggests a decline in empathy scores over time with the most significant change occurring between 2000 and 2009, correlating with the rise of digital communication. Later generations of college students have shown lower scores on both empathic concern, the emotional component of empathy, and perspective-taking, the cognitive component of empathy. Clearly, this is a problem.

However, it is also fair to point out that not all digital activity is the same and, therefore, the effects digital activity has on empathy can also vary. Research suggests that online activities that are a precursor to face-to-face communication are associated with higher real-life empathy, but other online activities that do not lead to face-to-face communication instead reduce real-world empathy scores. For example, chatting online with someone for a month means that I am far more likely to be empathic towards them when/if we meet in person, but participating in online activities based in fantasy worlds that do not transfer to real life might actually reduce real-world empathy.

Moreover, substituting digital communication for face-to-face communication can lead to a decrease in empathy because the brain’s empathic response depends on stimuli that digital communication filters out. As the researchers above suggest, while virtual empathy is positively correlated with real-world empathy, it is lower overall than real-world empathy scores. This means that we do not respond the same way in digital and in in-person spaces.

For example, think of the last time you ended a digital conversation feeling dissatisfied or distant. There’s a very strong possibility that someone responded to you in a digital space in ways that are not as thoughtful as you would have liked. This might be because the cues you sent were simply not picked up.

This brings us to another effect of digital communication, which is that of distraction.

Distraction

Most of us have been there. We’re messaging a friend and waiting for a reply when another notification pops up, or a housemate walks into the room, or the timer on the oven goes off. We put down our phone and our conversation pauses. When we return to the conversation again, even moments later, we pick up like nothing has happened.

But it has. While I’m taking something out of the oven or replying to an email, my friend might be sitting alone waiting for my response. My friend might have watched my status go from “typing” to blank space. And when I return to the conversation, I have no way of knowing what my friend has experienced in the time that lapsed. My friend doesn’t know what I was doing, either. 

In person, conversation depends on cadence and on rhythm. It ebbs and flows based on pauses, tone, and body language. I show I am listening by nodding or making appropriate noises. And I know it’s my turn to speak when suitable time has passed or I am asked a question.

Despite the immediacy of face-to-face communication, misunderstandings still occur. We all know this. This begs the question: If we get conversation wrong so often in real life, with all the richness of the cues and prompts in full view, how do we fare in the sterility of a digital space?

Psychology tells us (thanks to Danish physicist Tor Nørretranders) that over 85% of the stimulus that goes into our brains is visual, which means that all of the visual stimulus occurring at a particular time is competing for our attention. This means that anything that our eyes hook onto runs the chance of taking our attention away from anything else that was happening. As stated above, this could be as seemingly benign as a notification.

Psychology also tells us that less than 1% of all the sensory stimuli that are around us arrive at the brain. Think about that again. Less than 1% of what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste actually gets registered by our brain.  Attention is the most critical variable in being understood, yet it is also the thing that is seduced the most in a remote world. Without the immediacy of our conversation partner to direct us to the interaction that we are having, we waver, we wander, and we lose.

Induced media multitasking

Considering what we know about the brain’s capacity to pay attention to stimuli, it is not surprising that humans are poor multitaskers. In fact, we do not multitask at all. Instead, the brain performs extremely rapid switches to allow us to go back and forth between tasks. As I write this, music is playing in the background. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on the words I’m typing when Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is interrupting.

But if you’re anything like my students, you’d shout, “But wait! I need music to focus!” Some people claim that. Although the human brain is wired to process competing stimuli as a matter of survival, the processing of multiple stimuli means that we have a greater cognitive load and therefore less bandwidth, as in the above from Nørretranders, to pay attention. This means that while we can, by all appearances, do more than one thing at once, or attend to more than one area at a time, switching our attention also means that we do neither thing well.

To put it bluntly, the digital world requires us to look at multiple things. We do not look at any of them well, despite all we might say to convince ourselves and others of the opposite.

The erosion of meaningful connection

When communicating in digital spaces, we are less empathic, more distracted, and caught between competing stimuli. These are only some of the considerations to be aware of as our contact with others increasingly occurs in the digital world.

I am particularly concerned with the effects this has on meaningful human connection. If all of the above weren’t enough, also consider the fact that it is far easier to separate ourselves from others in a digital space than in a physical environment. One issue here is the security that many feel with the anonymity that digital communication provides. The research on bullying speaks volumes about what can happen when people are not in real-world contact with one another.

Furthermore, my digital communication with another person is separated by a screen. I might read their words or even hear their voice but I am in my own world and my own space. This prevents me from experiencing what my conversation partner is describing and can lead to desensitization of myself from another person. I am occupied with my world and choose when to enter theirs but we no longer occupy the space together. As we become more distant from one another, our conversations might fade from intimate, if they ever were, to cursory. 

Ultimately, the fear is that we are leading to a world of emotional isolation. If we are separated from others and cannot connect empathically with them the way that we are wired to do, what is left of communication? And without the connection that real-world communication facilitates, who do we become? How are we supposed to feel, to experience, to be? Who can we share our lives with?

These are very real questions that have been asked before, but the time now mandates that we ask them again, and do so forcefully.  All of us who are fortunate enough to have access to the digital world will experience some if not all of what is noted above, and all of us are therefore obliged to look around us, to acknowledge the issues that exist, and to act so that we can maintain some of our humanity.

Special thanks to a friend for the questions and dialogue that sparked this piece.

On My Mind

In transition

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It’s interesting to watch the mind shift and change, ebb and flow. It’s interesting to experience from the inside, noting the sensations and thoughts at hand, while also experiencing from the outside. That is, watching the self have the experience.

This is what I was doing yesterday when trying to come to terms with what I will call “the dark streak”.

Ever since I can remember, I have always had a streak of dark thoughts. These are the not-so-pleasant ideas that I know are there and every now and then under times of self-doubt, uncertainty, or stress, make their presence known. The dark streak, which I have previously also called the “demons“, is common enough that I am not especially bothered by it anymore. Rather, I am curious.

After yesterday’s encounter with the dark streak that annoyed me because I really hadn’t planned on it being there, I sat down to deliberately make observations. This is what I noticed:

  • The dark streak is likely to rear its head when I experience a sense of isolation. It goes away with a tangible reminder that I am actually not as alone as I might have thought.
  • The dark streak is imaginative rather than destructive. It likes to ponder a range of possibilities and actually gives me a lot to think about when I follow it.
  • The physical sensations that I experience at these times are more closely linked to the part of my brain that is observing the experience. The dark streak might be running hot but my body and mind remain calm and cool if I am watching the dark streak rather than running with it.
  • While the dark streak can paint a vivid image that stays with me, there is a difference between experiencing the image from inside and watching myself experience the image from outside. The latter perspective is that of the observer that I mentioned above.

I don’t ask why this happens – I’ve had help figuring that out. Instead, I can simply ask whether this is normal. But with that question on the tip of my tongue, I can also think of the idiosyncrasies that people have pointed out over time and all I can do in response is shrug. Put all the weird things together and that’s what makes us individuals, right?

There’s a dark streak in me and that’s okay. It’s hardly surprising that we’d become acquainted again.

Society has been experiencing a dramatic transition in the last weeks and months, and this will continue for the weeks and months to come. There will be economic and political effects felt for years, and perhaps a reckoning of social structures that have gone unquestioned for far too long. With transitions come the opportunity to change, reinvent, renew, and restore. Transitions allow us to look around, to ask questions, and to take the time (after all, we are not so busy any more) to do the hard work of figuring out who we are and who we want to be.

I will not romanticise here and claim that I am grateful for this time. (Rest assured, I was crushed when Singapore announced on Friday that we’d be joining the ranks of the rest of the world with school closings and movement restrictions.) But, as I have said for a long time, we need to take much more time to think and much more time to understand ourselves and one another. We have this time. Use it wisely.

Education

Learning in the Time of COVID-19

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Title inspired by Love in the Time of Cholera, which I’m thinking about reading when I’m done with the two books I’m in the middle of right now.

Where We Are Now

We’re in a different situation in Singapore than in much of the world. People are still going to work and we have not closed school. This is a neat graphic from UNESCO showing the spread of school closures globally and the number of students in different levels who are affected. Interestingly, Singapore is not on this map and I don’t know whether that’s because we’re still in school or because they forgot about us. As informative as it is, it also serves as a reminder that even reputable sources are not flawless.

We have not closed school in Singapore because the government has been down this road before. The requirements for travel declarations and the restrictions on movement, behaviour, and gathering began much earlier here than in Europe and much, much earlier than in North America. The first email from our deputy superintendent referring to “novel coronavirus pneumonia” was sent January 23. That was when the government first required travel declaration forms from everyone involved in an educational institution. On January 28, the day we returned from the Chinese New Year holiday, schools started taking everyone’s temperature on the way into the building. This has since been implemented at the community centre that houses my climbing gym (and I’m sure this isn’t the only one) and is part of the regimen in hospitals, movie theatres, malls, and recently some restaurants. On February 11, the WHO gave coronavirus a name – COVID-19. It wasn’t until March 6 that I finally received a message from a friend in the US asking how we’re doing here in Singapore.

We’re in a bit of a different situation at the moment in that we’ve been living with this for a long time.

And that’s the point – we’ve been going about our lives and living with this thing because Singapore has a disease outbreak response system that makes sense. We’ve been at DORSCON Orange since February 7. When it came out two years ago, I read The End of Epidemics by global health security expert Dr. Jonathan Quick. He cites Singapore’s response to SARS as a shining example of disease response done well and living through another round of that, I understand why.

Considering where we are and how Singapore has responded, it came as a huge blow to our students when the IBO cancelled May examinations on Sunday night. The IB has given itself until Friday to figure out next steps. The College Board AP, which my school also offers, is running 45-minute online exams. What is important to understand here is that AP and IB exams have a different purpose and carry very different weight and meaning for students. Unless our students are going to school in the US, they are accepted into universities on the basis of earning a certain overall IB score. Now that there are no exams, how will this affect graduation and university acceptances? We don’t know the answer to these questions right now.

Conversations with Young People

Understandably, my students were full of confused emotions in class yesterday. We spent some time just talking before getting down to business and I want to summarise our conversation. Hopefully it helps some of you figure out what to say (or not say!) to the young people in your life. They need guidance right now and we are there for them, even if we don’t have answers. The threads of our conversation went like this:

This is an emotional time.

My students told me that they’re feeling confused, upset, disappointed, and relieved. One or two were glad they didn’t have to study but the majority were crushed at losing everything they look forward to at the end of high school: prom, graduation, senior trip, and proving themselves on exams. We agreed that yes, it sucks.

What’s the point now?

Final exams have been the driver for much of what we’ve done for nearly two years and students, appropriately, wanted to know what the point is now. There are no exams . . . so what? What is there? We talked about learning for the sake of learning and about how far they’d come. We talked about showing themselves that they’ve come a long way.

We also talked about going on with life as normal. There will likely be some kind of end-of-course assessment. After all, we have already submitted required coursework to the IB and they will use it for something. We might very well run an assessment here in school, too. Additionally, there will still be grades on transcripts. These grades will come from somewhere, and they will indicate what students know.

Who are we supposed to turn to?

Multiple students expressed not knowing what to do and one put it very succinctly: “We’re confused,” he said, “and the people we’re supposed to ask for help don’t know anything either.” He’s right and it was important to acknowledge that. A student asked me to give my best educated guess about what might happen next and all I could say was that my previous educated guesses had been wrong so my best educated guess was to keep my mouth shut. “But what can you tell us as a friend?” he asked.

I told my students that they couldn’t turn to me for answers because I didn’t have any, but I did know that the world had been through a lot before and would not end with them. We don’t know what is coming next but we do know that these young people will complete high school and go off into the world to do something. We don’t know the path they will take to get there and we don’t know where “there” is, but we do know that life isn’t over. Look at what’s happened in China – students are going back to school!

I’m worried about what might happen next.

I reminded my students that when this all started two months ago, we were worried about schools in Asia closing and being disadvantaged for exams since everything in Europe was fine. We could not have predicted life returning to somewhat normal in China with the rest of the world closing its borders. Likewise, we cannot predict what is ahead.

We also talked a little bit about our families. With flights cancelled and travel restrictions across borders, we are “here” and our families, for many of us living overseas, are “there”. And we cannot get to them. With legal status determined by employment passes, student passes, and dependent passes, we don’t know if or when we’re going to be asked to leave. We don’t know whether our home countries will take us or if we’ll physically be able to get there. We do know that flights aren’t free and all of us have cancelled travel plans or had plans cancelled. What happens if our legal status changes?

I didn’t have answers but we had a conversation.

I gave up a lot for this.

After class, one student stayed back to talk. He said he’d sacrificed a lot to spend two years in the IB Diploma Programme and he would have chosen differently had he known it would come down to nothing. Ah, now this is something I can speak about with some confidence. Knowing the answer, I asked this student whether, knowing the options that existed at the beginning of grade 11, he could have chosen differently. Knowing who he was, could he have done anything differently over the past two years?

No, he told me. That’s true. That’s what made the most sense at the time.

And that, I said, is a way to approach being in the world, no matter the situation.

A Focus on Learning

We had to talk before my students were ready to get down to learning. I understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I know that students who are hungry need to eat before I can expect them to do anything else. This felt similarly. My students needed to be heard and they needed my honesty in order to trust that I had their best interests at heart, and then we went on with our intended tasks for the day.

If necessary, as so many are doing, I could run my classes remotely. A colleague and I have been piloting online learning tools in a shared class and we could make it work. There are a lot of resources out there and many of them are free. The best practices of online learning have been sharpened and honed through the work, effort, and time of many of my colleagues, known and unknown, and I am grateful for them.

One thing that we do know is that human connection is really, really important. Last week, we ran our parent-teacher conferences through Google Hangouts and it was a real gift to be invited into my students’ homes like that. Everyone was calmer and more relaxed than usual. What would it take to have a quick video chat with my students, or set them up with a platform that allowed them to do the same? (I’m told Zoom has “breakout rooms” and this is worth exploring.) It was really important to talk with my students yesterday about what was on their minds before we were able to do what we were meant to do.

There has been a lot of focus in education over the last several weeks about how to put teaching and learning online and I understand this focus. I agree that it is important. But it was also important to acknowledge that my students, for whom life has remained comparatively normal, have questions, too.

In this sense, we all have a wonderful opportunity to learn a little more about who we are as individuals and as a collective group of humans. I spoke with my students about recognising their own responses to stress and anxiety and how to manage unknowns. No matter what happens next, they were heading towards a huge unknown anyway because they were planning to go out in the world and start their lives. They will still do that, just not following a path that someone else had walked before them. We talked about ways to accept what we cannot change or control, and we talked about what it means to live according to who we are and what is important to us.

Additionally, we talked about the resilience of humanity. While we have individually fragile moments, humanity has also overcome great adversity. Some of my students have lived this in their own lives and some are experiencing it now for the first time. It is important for them to know that this is not the first life-altering, world-spinning-out-of-control moment that they will experience, and it is important for them to know that they will get through this one and the next one and the next one. We can make all the plans we want, but we learn a great deal about ourselves when look at how we respond when our plans go awry.

And it is important for students to know that this, too, shall pass and we will all be stronger and wiser when it does.

Conclusions

Learning through COVID-19 does not only mean learning in school. It also means learning about ourselves and about who we are. It means learning to let go and wait patiently when we would much rather be in control, and learning to pause and breathe when we’ve spent too long with our noses buried in the news.

It also means learning to recognise what we are feeling and manage it in a way that allows us to live as fully as we can. We can only live what is now and it does not help to ruminate over what might have been otherwise. Instead, as my students are learning, we live with what is and sometimes all we can do is take it one moment at a time.

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart. – Anonymous

Gyeongju, South Korea – October 2019