Digital Nation

>>In 2007, Frontline broadcast a film called "Growing Up Online."

>> We need to have the Internet on to talk to your friends because everybody uses it.

>> You can be more crazy online because there's no one watching to see what you're actually doing.

>> I had no idea what she was doing on the Internet.

That was a big surprise.

>>But today, it's not just our kids.

All of us are immersed in technology, all the time... >> This is a digital moment in my life.

>>...from multitasking... >> Multitasking could be, essentially, "dumbing down" the world.

>>...to the military... >> It is a complete cultural change for the Air Force.

>>...in work... >> I mean, you've all met in real life at one point, right?

>> Actually, no.

>>...and at play... >> The first hour, I was hooked.

I would play literally non-stop.

>>...and on the virtual frontier.

>> The question is, are we entering a new paradigm, or is this just the next best thing?

>> That's okay, they're not in the real world.

>> I think that you will live in the virtual world a significant percentage of the time.

>>Tonight,Frontlineproducer Rachel Dretzin and correspondent Douglas Rushkoff look at the wired world we're living in, our new digital nation.

>> I kind of want to push the "pause" button-- pow-- and everything stops and we can look and say, "Just what's going on here?"

>> DRETZIN: So, it really hit me one night not that long ago.

I was in the kitchen and I was cooking dinner, chopping vegetables, and my husband was in the next room on his laptop, and across the table from my husband was my oldest son, who was also on a laptop, doing his homework.

Wash your hands.

Did you wash your hands?

And my younger kids had picked up my iPhone and were playing a game on it or something.

And I don't know, it just hit me-- we're all in the same house, but we're also in other worlds.

And, I don't know, it just kind of snuck up on us.

I didn't see it coming.

>> These young teenagers on the phones and on the computers, it's amazing.

Like, when I was growing up, it wasn't like that.

>> I just remember, when I went on my honeymoon 25 years ago, we were away for two weeks, and we didn't know anything that happened in the two weeks that we were gone, because we were on vacation.

And that simply doesn't happen anymore.

>> We now have these tools to reach so many people, all of a sudden, we look around and say, "Whoa, now what?"

>> Well over half my life exists in the digital world.

>> I'm connected to my Blackberry.

I need it at all times.

I can't even imagine...

I can't even imagine not having it.

>> I use my phone.

I go on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, everything.

>> That's my digital life.

>> RUSHKOFF: I mean, it's like returning to the scene of the crime.

This is the first place... this is where it all began.

This is the first college... >> DRETZIN: When I started this project, looking at life in the digital age, the first person I turned to was my friend Douglas Rushkoff, whom I've worked with on two previous films.

Doug's been writing about the Internet for close to two decades.

>> RUSHKOFF: Well, geeks are normal now.

>> DRETZIN: It's true.

We decided to start here, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

>> RUSHKOFF: If anyone is a new species of digital native, it would be the MIT student.

>> DRETZIN: These kids are among the smartest, most wired people on the planet right now.

They may hardly remember a time when they weren't able to be online anywhere they went.

>> I have three tests this week.

>> DRETZIN: Everywhere you go on this campus, kids are looking at screens, sometimes multiple screens.

>> Do you want an email back?

>> I was productive on Saturday.

I went out Friday.

>> DRETZIN: Take Eliza.

She's 20, a mechanical engineering major, and completely wired, all the time.

>> Is it going to stay in beta for as long as Gmail stayed in beta?

Like, a decade?

I have a few friends who, if they hear the word Blackberry, they think of me.

Like, I am never off of it; it is glued to me.

When it's more than arm's length from me, I start to get panicky.

It's very disconcerting.

I like...

I'm, like, "I'll pull it up and show it to you ."

And I don't even send it to you.

Are we Gchat buddies?

I'm always IM-ing or texting, or things like that.

Always checking my phone, taking care of other things while I'm doing something else.

>> You are talking to your friend at the same time you're talking to your other friend same time you're emailing another friend about what you're going to do tomorrow night.

Classes here aren't fun, man.

We kind of understand that, too, between each other.

We'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 it.

I'm like, that's okay because I'm going to do that to him anyways, so... you just... it's a mutual understanding.

School, I think, is kind of the same.

Like, you're paying attention in class to your professor, you're emailing another professor, and you're looking up something else.

>> Nobody who's been teaching for 25 years would say that our students aren't different now than they were then.

I mean, they need... they need to be stimulated in ways they didn't need to be stimulated before.

>> DRETZIN: Sherry Turkle has been teaching at MIT for more than 30 years.

>> Every 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.

>> DRETZIN: Like most universities, MIT allows laptops in its classes at the professors' discretion.

>> I mean, it even changes how teachers teach.

Because now, the... the pressure is on teaching kind of scintillating PowerPoint things that will distract them from the Web.

>> So, you've hit on most of the key points.

There are two sorts of things you can test students about.

You 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.

And I don't think they're doing either of those things well.

I have no idea how that's possible....

I 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, and the mean score was probably about a 75%.

It's not that the students are dumb.

It's not that they're not trying.

I think they're trying in a way that's not as effective as it could be because they're distracted by everything else.

>> I teach at MIT.

I teach the most brilliant students in the world.

But they have done themselves a disservice by drinking the Kool-Aid and believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes.

There really are important things you cannot think about unless it's still, and you're only thinking about one thing at a time.

There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things.

>> I have, like, 25 in the last 15 minutes.

I feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well and that we do at all times.

And so if they try and restrict us from doing it, it's almost unfair because we are completely capable, moving in between lecture and other things, and just keeping track of the many things that are going on in our lives.

>> DRETZIN: No one's actually measured whether these kids are as successful at multitasking as they claim to be.

But out in California, a respected research lab is studying their counterparts on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto.

>> You know, they understand the research.

They're smart kids.

But they seem utterly convinced it doesn't apply to them.

We wanted to study what's really going on in the brain, but when it comes to what parts of the brain, we know nothing.

These are really the first studies of brain imaging of multitaskers versus non-multitaskers, so anything we discover here is new because we know zero.

Now, in this lab here, we're researching speaking on the cell phone while driving.

>> Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult person.

>> You walk around the world and you see people multitasking.

They're playing games and they're reading email and they're on Facebook, et cetera.

Yet classic psychology says that's impossible, no one can do that.

In general, our brains can't do two things at once.

And we want to ask the question, how do they do it?

Do they have some secret ingredient, some special ability that psychologists had no idea about, or what's going on?

You guys were chosen because you're very high chronic multitaskers.

>> DRETZIN: Nass allowed us to film one of his studies, conducted on a group of carefully chosen students.

>> On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once.

These are kids who are doing five, six or more things at once, all the time.

>> DRETZIN: The experiment looks simple-- identify numbers as odd or even, letters as vowels or consonants.

But it's rife with traps in the form of distractions.

Nass is testing how quickly these kids can switch between tasks without losing their focus.

>> I'm pretty much constantly texting, and whenever I study, I have my laptop out... >> DRETZIN: Brian is a junior.

>> I'm watching a YouTube video, I'm checking my email, non-stop refreshing the page, you know, on Facebook, Facebook chat... >> DRETZIN: He's pretty confident that his multitasking is successful.

>> So that I can always stay connected.

>> DRETZIN: So you think you're effective?

>> I think so.

>> DRETZIN: But his results, like others Nass has tested, suggested otherwise.

>> What we found is you're actually significantly slower when you're switching than when you're doing kind of the same task consistently.

>> Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking, and one of the big discoveries is, "You know what?

You're really lousy at it."

It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking.

They get distracted constantly.

Their memory is very disorganized.

Recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytic reasoning.

We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.

>> DRETZIN: When I got back to New York, I noticed how much I, too, fell prey to distractions.

I kept catching myself in the act-- checking my email when I should have been writing a script, googling something to satisfy a random curiosity.

This is affecting all of us.

>> The Shakespeare quote of "We are consumed by that which we are nourished by."

Speaking for myself, if all I do is my email and my calendar and my searches and my...

I feel great.

I feel like a master of the universe, getting my calendar and my meetings and my...

I just feel great.

And then, it's the end of the day, I've been busy all day and I haven't thought about anything hard.

I mean, the point is... the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to distract ourselves to death.

>> RUSHKOFF: Distraction.

Combating distraction isn't as easy as turning off your email program.

If you turn off your email program, it's not the software that's going to complain, it's the people on the other side-- your friends, your boss, your bills.

"Where's my report?"

"Why haven't you answered your email?

Are you mad at me?"

You can't do this in isolation.

If you're going to deal with the problem of distraction, it's something we're going to have to deal with together.

>> DRETZIN: I feel like something's out of whack for me.

>> RUSHKOFF: Maybe it's time to press the "pause" button.

Well, it's not just you, it's everybody.

We need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize.

Changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff.

I mean, look at these kids.

According to the latest data, most of them are spending more than 50 hours a week with digital media.

That's more than a full work week.

What is this doing to their brains?

>> You have young people whose brains are not fully developed.

So 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.

>> RUSHKOFF: So far, there's only one neuroscientist who's actually examined the impact of the Internet on our brains-- Dr. Gary Small at UCLA.

He took MRI scans of people's brain activity reading a book, and then another doing an Internet search.

>> This summarizes what we found in that brain-on-Google study.

So here's your brain reading a book, here's your brain on Google.

More than two-fold increase in the extent of activity.

Notice how much activity there is in the front part of the brain, the decision- making part of the brain, which makes sense, because we know we're making lots of decisions when we're searching online.

>> RUSHKOFF: You'd think more brain activity-- all that red-- means Google is making us smarter.

And, in fact, that's what most of the headlines said when Small's research was first released.

But I knew it couldn't be that simple.

Where's the other picture, the reading one?

I feel like this does not do reading justice.

>> Well, you know, on a brain scan, big is not necessarily better.

You 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.

But if you train, you're going to become much better, you're going to be in better shape, you're going to lift more weight, and it's not going to take that much energy.

So one could argue small is better.

It's a little bit like playing golf-- you want your score to go down.

>> RUSHKOFF: So wait a second-- all that media hype, and the doctor himself isn't so sure about their conclusions?

Small's study wasn't a confirmation of the Internet's beneficial effects; if anything, it was a call for some real research, now.

So why isn't anyone looking at the real effects of near constant net use?

>> By the time you design a research study, apply for funding, implement the study, and you publish the results about the technology, what has happened?

The technology is obsolete.

We've moved beyond it.

And so the technology and the practices that go with the new technologies, they keep outdistancing the research.

The research can't catch up with it.

>> We're immersed in it, and it's changing so rapidly, we're just beginning to grasp what's happening.

So think of how long it took us to understand that smoking was bad for our health.

I think it takes people a while for reality to hit them in the face.

It's hard to get people to stop texting while they're driving, although it's a 23 times greater risk of having an accident.

How do you get people to stop these behaviors?

It's very difficult.

>> RUSHKOFF: Since when has spending time online become a risky behavior, like drinking or gambling?

Is it that addictive?

>> I think it's addictive.

There's controversy among experts whether it is or not.

In Asia, there's a recognition that teenagers... many teenagers are addicted to video games.

I think that we're behind the Asians in terms of focusing on the problem.

>> RUSHKOFF: It's hard to follow the story of Asia's digital revolution without somehow ending up in South Korea.

South Korea's digital culture isn't characterized by the home computer so much as its legendary Internet cafes, known as "PC bangs," which dot the streets of every major city here.

(car horn honks) There are thousands of them in Seoul alone, offering cheap, 24/7 high-speed Internet access to the tens of thousands of kids who want to play video games all day, or even all night.

Do you ever stay overnight, all night?

>> DRETZIN: It's here in the PC bangs, people say, that the Korean gaming craze has gotten out of hand, and it was sobering to see row after row of kids glued to these screens, expressionless.

As 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.

We read the newspaper about Korea, they say gaming is a problem now, that people are addicted to the games, addicted to the Internet, and they're not getting their studies done.

Do you feel... is there a problem for you?

>> (translated) There's an argument about whether it's a real disease or just a phenomenon.

But we think it's definitely an addiction.

>> RUSHKOFF: The Korean government commissioned this psychiatrist, Dr. Ahn Dyon Hyung, to conduct a three-year study on the question of Internet addiction.

His findings helped Korea become one of the first countries to treat it as a psychiatric disorder.

>> (translated) About 90% of Korean children use the Internet in their daily life.

Of those, about 10% to 15% are in the high-risk group.

>> RUSHKOFF: What's now a public health crisis began with the best of intentions.

Ten years ago, this country emerged from economic crisis by refashioning its culture and commerce around digital technology.

Its embrace of the online world was broad and deep, and it's not altogether surprising that South Korea has become one of the first countries to confront the fallout of the digital revolution.

We met 15-year-old Chung Young Il in a city south of Seoul.

>> (translated) It's pretty extreme.

I play seven or eight hours a day, and then on weekends, I stay up all night on the computer.

>> (translated) When Young-Il starts a game, he doesn't know when to stop and he just plays for hours.

>> RUSHKOFF: Over the last year, Young-Il has dropped from the top half of his class to the bottom.

His mother thinks it's because of the computer.

>> (translated) I'm not sure, but I think he mostly uses the computer to play some type of fighting game.

I wish those games didn't exist.

>> (translated) That inability to communicate with me, his own mother, makes me so sad.

>> (translated) I think if I can't control him right now, I may lose my son.

This is an addiction.

Only an addict could act this way.

>> RUSHKOFF: In an effort to help kids like Young-Il, the Korean government has opened free Internet rescue camps throughout the country.

At the recommendation of a teacher, Young-Il's mother will be leaving him here for two weeks.

The day starts with a group counseling session.

Most of the kids here say they've had to seek medical treatment for conditions that resulted from overusing the computer, like eye strain and ear complications.

The kids' treatment regimen, surprisingly low-tech, seemed designed mainly to recapture a childhood lost to the computer.

When you go home, will you start using the computer again, or will it be different?

>> (translated) Honestly, I don't expect a lot.

Not using the computer for ten days was hard.

I just keep thinking about the games, or about getting out of the camp and going home.

My heart went out to these kids, casualties of the digital revolution.

For better and for worse, these people are connected and connecting through the technologies that I championed 20 years ago, when I first started writing and speaking about a future I called "Cyberia."

>> His latest is called "Cyberia."

Doug Rushkoff joins us this morning in New York.

Hello, Doug.

>> RUSHKOFF: Hi, good to be here.

In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives.

>> Are folks getting a little afraid of the technology since it's going so quickly?

Are we going to be left in the dust, or can we keep up?

>> RUSHKOFF: Well, I think people get scared as things develop, especially... Back then, I was convinced the Web could help us change in profoundly good ways, allowing us to evolve into better people.

>> Well, I'd like to introduce you, Ms. Tollman, to the new human being.

Here he is.

>> RUSHKOFF: Well, it's a new human being that's evolved, I think, to the next level, and I think it's fascinating and wonderful to watch.

I felt like I was in on a secret, that these old fuddy duddys were just panicking, underestimating our kids' ability to adapt to the new reality before us.

If you're actually moving around the pixels yourself on the screen... Over the past 20 years, however, the Net has changed from a thing one does to the way one lives, connected all the time.

And it appears that far more of these kids than I would have thought are overwhelmed.

The Korean government has taken an assertive approach to addressing the social problems caused by the Net.

At Korean elementary schools, kids are taught to go online at around the same time they are taught to read.

But they're also taught something else-- how to use computers responsibly.

It's required for Korean students, starting in the second grade.

At this school, signs preaching healthy Internet habits line the hallways.

What's this one say?

>> "Slanderous comments on Internet hurts my friend."

>> RUSHKOFF: And this one says, "Constantly playing computer games shrinks your capacity to think."

"Our ancestors were known as the politest eastern state.

Now, we are the kingdom of Internet etiquette."

When a child is just six years old, what's the most important things they need to learn about the Internet?

>> (translated) I think they must learn ethics first-- Internet etiquette and manners-- and then learn the technical side of it.

>> RUSHKOFF: Watching these kids, I'm skeptical that this top-down approach could ever work in America.

I guess we'll have to find our own way.

>> DRETZIN: At home in Brooklyn, I have three digital natives of my own.

Watching my kids with the computer, I find myself wondering, "How did they figure this out?

Were these skills somehow handed out at birth?

And could anything that seems so natural really be bad?"

>>Salut.

>>Salut.

>>Comment allez-vous?

>>Comment allez-vous?

>> DRETZIN: Last fall, after a lot of careful consideration, we decided to send our oldest son to a middle school that requires him to use a laptop in class and for most of his homework.

We figured, since he's likely to be using computers for the rest of his life, he might as well learn to use them in a school setting.

What are you doing?

>> I'm look at these blogs for my English History.

>> DRETZIN: Show me.

>> So this one's about current events.

>> DRETZIN: Wait-- who wrote these blogs?

>> Our class.

I mean, it was homework one night.

>> DRETZIN: How do you know how to make a blog?

>> And this is mine.

It's called edu-blogs.

It's really because you can add links, like this, and you can add comments.

>> There's a difference between the people who grew up with the technology and the people who didn't.

So, I'm an immigrant to this world, whereas the kids who grew up in it are... are natives.

Where are we?

There we are.

19 responses.

The answer is the Middle Ages.

Why?

>> DRETZIN: We filmed at this high school in Chatham, New Jersey, when we were making our last documentary, "Growing Up Online," which looked at the impact of the Internet on adolescence.

>> How many are confident of their answers?

>> DRETZIN: The school had largely embraced the idea that their classrooms need to meet kids where they're living: online.

>> If you look at all these images... see?

These are... these take place at different times.

>> DRETZIN: Steve Maher was a history teacher there.

>> If you think about the media environment that an average American teenager lives in, to walk into a classroom that doesn't have any of that media must be walk... like walking into a desert.

Is number two easy?

>> DRETZIN: That was the first time it occurred to me that my children's education might have a different purpose than mine did.

>> Who would do that?

Someone from the Middle Ages or someone from the Renaissance?

The 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.

The world is going to require for them to do stuff, to build things, to work on stuff, and that's what we're preparing them for.

>> We can argue all we want about kids needing to stay in their seat and be quiet.

But 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.

>> DRETZIN: Jason Levy is the principal of a middle school in New York's South Bronx.

>> How you doing?

Kids are going to need to be fluent in technology, they're going to need to be excellent at communication, they're going to need to be problem solvers.

That's just the way the world is now.

>> DRETZIN: Four years ago, the school was on the verge of collapse.

>> Kids were not being challenged.

There were a lot of fights and arguments.

A lot of gang activity.

>> DRETZIN: Only 9% of the students were meeting state standards in math.

>> Walking through the hallways, it felt like, at any moment, chaos was going to break out.

It felt like, every day, we were holding on with everything we could just to get through the day.

How you guys doing?

>> DRETZIN: Levy took over the school in 2004, after a string of other principals had been unable to turn it around.

>> Let's go.

>> DRETZIN: He had an ambitious idea.

>> Jason said, "My vision is to have all the students with laptops, do their homework online."

I said, "Jason, I've been doing this for 25 years.

You think this is possible?

I think you're crazy."

He said, "No, this is going to happen.

This is going to work here, Gina.

Watch."

>> Thank you very much.

That was a good job.

To me, there should never be a question as to whether or not students should have access to technology.

Technology is like oxygen, you know.

no one would ever have an argument that we should take away they oxygen from the kids.

I think, if anything, we make school make more sense for them when we provide them with the opportunity to use technology.

>> Please log in.

The computer has been amazing.

It's an email I sent called "Monday Ning project tasks."

Ning is a social networking site where you can make your own separate little network.

And so I created Ning social networks for my students as characters for "To Kill a Mockingbird."

If you are Atticus, you're creating the discussion question... And they can write discussion questions, they can comment on each others' walls, they upload pictures, they write diary entries, they add music.

They're finding jazz songs that I gave them, Billie Holiday songs, that go with the time period.

Yeah, that's fine.

And it's amazing these kids are getting so into it.

Because I was really worried that they wouldn't grasp the novel.

>> Incidents of violence are way down.

We track those things and they've been decimated.

Daily attendance is up over 90%.

In test scores, we went up in reading 30%, and in math almost 40%.

You know, I wake up every day and I go to bed every night knowing that we're doing something right.

>> DRETZIN: Something is working here, undoubtedly.

It feels like the kids' minds are being opened in a new way.

They're hooked.

But is there a catch to this?

>> My concern with this digital media is that it's such short-attention-span stuff, that they get bored.

It's what I call "instant gratification education"-- a thought comes to you, you pursue it.

You see a Web site, you click on it.

You want to hear music while you're studying, you do it.

All this bifurcates the brain, keeps it from being able to pursue one linear thought, and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs.

>> DRETZIN: The school is often battling the lures of online distractions.

Its firewall blocks access to sites like YouTube and MySpace, but the kids figure out how to get to them anyway.

>> Sometimes the teachers bore us, and instead of listening to them, we go on the Web sites.

>> If a teacher comes or something, they'll switch it so the teacher won't see.

It's mostly MySpace, AIM, and games.

But at the same time, doing our schoolwork.

>> So I click, and there's an "observe" button.

And it brings up their screen.

>> DRETZIN: The school's assistant principal spends part of each day remotely monitoring what the kids are doing on their laptops.

>> Oh, we have a Photo Booth.

>> DRETZIN: He can see them, but they can't see him.

>> These kids are goofing off, taking pictures of themselves in class.

>> DRETZIN: So, wait, do all the kids have the cameras on?

>> Sixth and seventh grade have the cameras.

A lot of kids are just on it to just check their hair, do their makeup.

They use it like it's a mirror.

I always like to mess with them and take a picture.

Nine times out of ten, they duck out of the way.

And then they shut down and they get right back to work.

So, I can see he's got a few things going on here.

He's got the Photo Booth program open.

He's got his social studies project open.

School email open.

You know, I think the kids know what is expected of them, but they also want to do all their other things.

That's what I see a lot of, is the multitasking.

"But I was doing my work, too."

>> DRETZIN: Most of the adults at the school actually seemed pretty sanguine about the kids being so easily distracted.

>> You learn something new every day.

>> I think there's something to be said for multitasking.

I think that teaching students to multitask is really important for their future jobs.

Remember to get quotes and page numbers from the book.

>> We have to embrace the fact that our kids are going to need different skills five years from now than they needed five years ago.

I think that the world has sped up in a lot of ways, and I think education hasn't.

>> DRETZIN: Here in the Bronx, where most of the kids weren't engaged in school at all before, bringing in technology has clearly been a net gain.

But what about the kids at MIT, and the multitasking experiments at Stanford?

At some point, does the increase in use of technology create diminishing returns?

>> I never read books.

I'll be honest, I can't remember the last time I read a book.

>> DRETZIN: Greg Bukata was a senior when we filmed at Chatham High School several years ago.

>> Nowadays, people are so busy that they need to get summaries of it, like SparkNotes.

You can read the whole book in a matter of pages.

So I read all online.

I've actually never read, like, "Romeo and Juliet," so I read it yesterday in five minutes.

I mean, if there were 27 hours in a day, I'd read "Hamlet," I really would, but it's only 24.

>> You will find a lot of English professors saying, "I can't assign a novel more than 200 pages.

I used to; I can't anymore."

>> DRETZIN: Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation.

It's filled with data suggesting that kids aren't as academically capable as they used to be before all these digital distractions.

>> What I would like more than anything else is for young people to prove every single harsh judgment in that book flat wrong, right?

We want them to grow up and to blow us away with their literacies, their reading and writing skills, their knowledge about... about history and art, and their civic activity.

But we just don't see it.

>> DRETZIN: Bauerlein quotes a 2007 N.E.A.

study that shows that while younger students' reading skills are improving, as kids get older and ostensibly more wired, their reading deteriorates.

And he claims that writing skills are suffering, too.

>> When theChronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors about basic skills today as compared to ten years ago, only 6% of them said that college students come into their classes very well prepared in writing.

By a two-to-one margin, they said basic skills are worse today than they were a decade ago.

>> You already hear professors and others talking about changes in the way kids write, so that instead of writing an essay, they write in paragraphs.

They write a paragraph, and they say, "Oh, now I'll look at Facebook for a while."

Or they write a paragraph and say, "Oh, a chance to play poker" or to do all of these at once.

So what we're seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through, and much more little bursts and snippets.

>> DRETZIN: The MIT students we met confirmed that constant interruptions have an effect on their writing.

We've talked to professors-- not necessarily here-- but who say students of your generation write in paragraphs.

In other words, there isn't this kind of connection between paragraphs.

It's like the paragraphs are separate and... >> Oh, I yelled at for that all the time.

All the time.

My papers, my first draft, it's always like "All right, paragraph one-- awesome; two-- awesome; three-- awesome.

I don't see the connection."

And in my head, "Well, I was probably thinking about something else during that" or "I wasn't look at the big picture."

It was short term, short term, short term.

"Let me write out an awesome paragraph and then go to the next one, my next idea."

>> Midest?

>> Midst.

>> DRETZIN: My kids are young and they all still read books.

>> Kansas.

>> Kansas.

>> DRETZIN: But will that stop being the case as they get more immersed in technology?

To me, that seems like a pretty devastating loss.

>> The reason a lot of people are stuck, I think, is because they confuse the old ways, the best ways of doing something once, with the best ways of doing those things forever.

So it's not that kids shouldn't learn to communicate, it's not that they shouldn't learn to express complex ideas-- of course they should still learn all those things.

Those are what we call the verbs, the nouns that they use, whether it's the essay or the paper or the writing or whatever it is.

Or whether it's the video or the podcast or the... that's what changes.

The learning may stay the same, but we invent new ways of teaching.

And I don't know that the book-- which was for a long period of time, but not that long, maybe a couple of centuries, the way that people did this-- that was the primary way, is the best way in the 21st century.

>> There's always gains and losses.

You know, when, print replaced oral culture, when writing happened, there were certainly things we lost.

One of them was memory.

Think of the Homeric poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey."

The Homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of poetry out of their own memory.

We're not good at that anymore because print took it away.

Is it a loss?

Sure.

And to a certain extent, getting people to be contemplative and a little slower, not to multitask all the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time, to a certain extent, might be lost.

But that's the price of gain.

>> DRETZIN: Do you struggle with the issue of distraction, personally?

>> I don't know anyone on the planet who doesn't struggle with the issue of distraction personally.

You get pulled in every direction today.

But this is not a new issue.

Go back and read descriptions of the Progressive Era, walking down the streets in New York, and the sense of your eyes being pulled in every direction by the hubbub of the crowd.

People described it as being, like, electrocuted, you know, bolts of energy shooting through you from every direction.

People as early as the 1960s were telling us we were moving to a reality of information overload.

So 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, and the good news is, we survived it.

As a culture, we've learned how to adapt to it.

So, what we are seeing is a period of evolution.

And 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.

>> I'm on my computer 24/7.

It's kind of sad, but it's also kind of a good thing that we should embrace technology that we have.

And we should be thankful for it.

>> I was in the library with my Blackberry, I had my laptop.

>> DRETZIN: OnFrontline's "Digital Nation" Web site, hundreds of people have submitted their own stories about how the net has impacted their lives.

>> She said, "You know what?

This is really sad.

We're supposed to be on vacation and we're totally wired."

>> DRETZIN: There are stories of parenting in the digital age... >> My son learned to read through gaming.

>> My kids can do four or five functions concurrently and never even break a sweat.

>> DRETZIN: ...of personal transformation... >> I went from a carboholic couch potato to a cyber-crusading warrior princess.

>> I deleted her, I deleted her sister.

>> DRETZIN: ...stories of romance... >> I deleted her cousin, I deleted her three best friends.

>> DRETZIN: ...and struggles with privacy.

>> I ended up taking it down, but now I sort of feel like I have to censor sometimes what I say with my family, whereas before, like, the minute I felt something before, I'd would just type it out, but now that I know that people are watching me... >> DRETZIN: So check this one out.

But one of the most irresistible stories was this one.

>> Let me tell you this: I never knew what blogging was or Twitter or any of these fancy names.

Do you know, I'm becoming an expert?

>> DRETZIN: It turned out that an 83-year-old woman and her grandson have a hit online cooking show called "Feed Me, Bubbe."

>> Bubbe, what's today's Yiddish word?

>> Today's word is "Bubbe", meaning "grandmother."

>> DRETZIN: Bubbe cooks and her grandson Avrom does everything else.

>> Hi.

>> Well, hello.

Rachel and Doug, welcome to my home.

Shalom.

Come in.

Come into my favorite spot, the kitchen.

Are you hungry?

Do you want to eat?

It's just tuna fish with a little bit of mayo.

And then roll it up carefully.

>> DRETZIN: Thank you.

>> Thank you, Bubbe.

>> You know, I worked until I was 73.

I worked for a bank.

And all of a sudden, this came along, and now I'm too busy.

>> The Internet, really, I have to say, added years to Bubbe's life.

>> I think, these days, it's important for any age.

I 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.

>> RUSHKOFF: Do you sometimes feel bad for kids being raised in an Internet era?

That they depend so much on the digital for their sense of connection to other people?

>> They grew up with it; to them, it's like second nature.

And it's easier for my grandchildren to go into email...

I get angry sometimes at them, I say, "You know, I'd like to hear your voice.

I know you email."

They sit down and type out an email, and it's wonderful.

"But call me on the telephone."

>> Ready to answer some emails?

>> Yep.

>> Okay.

>> "Every time I read your recipes, "I think about my mother.

I miss her.

Thank you."

There's something missing, that they have to pour their heart out to me.

Oh, she's writing about the jelly-jammies.

Their memories, their feelings, their weaknesses.

>> What do you want to say to Charlotte?

>> Please let me know how you make out.

Signed, Bubbe.

It's...

I don't know, a little bit of loneliness that there's something there that I filled, that Bubbe fills the gap, that video fills the gap.

Please keep in touch.

>> RUSHKOFF: Bubbe uses the net to help simulate a sense of connection that people had with their own grandmothers.

But it's just a baby step.

Nobody gets to go to Bubbe's kitchen in the flesh.

Not yet, anyway.

But there are people who are nonetheless reaching through to the other side of the screen, trying to inhabit the net as if it were a real place.

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game that brings millions of people from around the world into the same virtual universe; in this case, a land of dragons, elves, and orcs called Azeroth.

Azeroth has three continents to explore, in almost infinite detail.

Players travel its skies, seas, forests, and deserts on everything from mechanical birds to gryphons.

>> When you're playing a massive multi-player game like World of Warcraft, you're having experiences that you could never have had in the real world.

Games do give people a powerful vicarious life.

When you think about it, for most of human time on Earth, you couldn't be any different then you were born.

If you were born a peasant, that was it.

If I came along to that guy and said, you know, "You're going to be a peasant for all your life, but I've got this world you can enter where you can be a king," who wouldn't have played it?

>> Going in three, two, one.

>> That element of fantasy, that element of imagination is incredibly powerful.

You are fully immersed in a world that's telling you a kind of story.

We often get this when we watch a film or a read a book we're really interested in.

But games seem to do it even more, I think, because games create this kind of immersive world that you step into.

And that's powerful.

>> You know, that's kind of weird.

They pulled without everything else.

>> And you actually have a really hard problem to work on and other people to help work on it.

>> They shouldn't be late.

>> RUSHKOFF: Alen lives in New York and is a member of a guild-- a group of players that work together to fight off monsters, attack enemy outposts, and have adventures.

This guild raids, on average, four evenings a week.

>> I need to hug my boy good night.

I'll be right back.

>> Win Rider, Orc Shamen, Windster Clan Horde!

>> RUSHKOFF: Many of these people never actually meet each other in person unless they travel to one of the annual fan conventions sponsored by the gaming companies.

>> They told me you'd be here.

>> RUSHKOFF: But they say they consider each other close friends.

>> We talk four times a week because we meet online, so... We recognize everyone's voices, and we're just getting used to faces now.

>> Yeah, we have members as far away as New Zealand.

>> RUSHKOFF: Last summer, we followed Alen and his wife Liza out to California, where every year, Blizzard Entertainment throws a giant party for its fans.

>> Oh, my God.

They're all playing the game.

>> RUSHKOFF: Sure, games like Warcraft aren't for everyone, but the number and variety of people here was impressive.

This is PC bang, U.S. style.

They get it once a year.

America's enthusiasm for this genre may not be quite as widespread as it is in Korea, but it also seems to be fueled by a somewhat different desire: the urge to connect to other people.

>> We've all spent hundreds of hours together.

My traditional-style friends who I have outside the game, none of them do I spend 16 hours a week with, week in and week out.

I mean, I've known some of these folks for years.

>> People who do not game and do not have the experience, don't understand the friendships, the connections, and how close you can get to someone that you've never seen.

>> RUSHKOFF: But just like the gamers in Korea, a sizeable number of American players struggle with compulsive gaming.

>> The first hour I was hooked.

I was immediately immersed in this world.

Of course, completely made up, but it was so striking and I could not stop playing at all.

I would play literally non-stop.

>> I got so into World of Warcraft that I was getting up at about 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, and I'd play straight through the day, and I wouldn't log off until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

I even kind of quit my job, because I really didn't want to do anything other than play World of Warcraft.

>> RUSHKOFF: The average amount of time people spend in Warcraft is nearly ten hours a week, but many people spend much, much more.

The fantasy role-playing game Everquest is just as compelling.

>> And she's down!

>> Oh, I've talked with you!

Oh, you're Nicholas?!

>> I'm Nicholas!

>> DRETZIN: How do you guys all know each other?

>> Met through the game.

>> All online.

We had never met before we came down here to Las Vegas.

>> This is the most fun I've ever had in my life.

>> Yes, ever.

>> I'm closer to my online friends than anybody in real life.

>> Yeah, pretty much.

>> Definitely.

>> Oh, let's hear it.

>> RUSHKOFF: The relationships people forge in these games seem to have a particularly intense quality.

>> Nice to meet you.

>> RUSHKOFF: It's not uncommon for in-game romances to migrate to real life, even lead to marriage.

>> They met in World of Warcraft.

>> And now we're married.

>> And now they're married.

>> RUSHKOFF: Evidently, almost a third of female players have met a romantic partner inside the game.

>> You know, we went out and had dates in real life, but to me I'm always going to consider my first date the time when he broke into a castle to come meet me.

I just thought it was so romantic.

>> We still play together, we have our computers in the same room so we can talk to each other.

We sit back to back, play the games and strategize.

Yeah.

>> RUSHKOFF: I knew better than to assume that all gamers were antisocial geeks, but I was still surprised by just how deeply connected these people seemed to be to each other.

The technology wasn't isolating them; it was giving them a new way to be intimate.

Maybe virtual worlds do offer humans the chance to go and do something altogether new.

>> Charlie-Lima, verify you copy, make left traffic.

>> Two-Charlie-Lima, verify left traffic.

I remember from the time I was young, always wondering, "Well, is there more than this?"

You know, whenever I'd do anything, I'd always kind of have this question in the back of my mind, saying, "Well, does it get better than this?

"Does it get better?

This is beautiful now.

This is awesome.

In fact, I remember a great aphorism that said, "Imagine the world as good as you can imagine it, "and then know one thing: God has imagined it better than you."

And that always made me... that always made me think, "Oh, really?"

>> 262 Charlie-Lima inbound over... >> RUSHKOFF: When Philip Rosedale created Second Life, he insisted it was not a game, it was a new reality.

>> If you ask the question, what does the virtual world look like?

It looks like the average of all the things we dream about.

It's a place where you can become someone new, and it's a place where you can create and discover things that you couldn't possibly imagine or have ever seen here on Earth.

>> RUSHKOFF: Why can't I fly?

I thought page up is fly.

Second Life is an immersive 3D, online universe.

You make a character called an avatar.

And then you live in that world as that person.

Avatars in Second Life can do most anything real people do: purchase real estate, hold rock concerts, give seminars, create art, and make money.

For a while, companies like Coke and Calvin Klein, thinking Second Life would be the next big thing, opened virtual outposts there.

It didn't work.

Marketing real goods in virtual worlds never really took off.

But Rosedale says that creating a viable marketplace was never his point.

He wanted something else, to rewrite the rules of interaction between human beings.

>> I think that our society today, you know, we are alienated from each other and from the world around us.

When people come together in a virtual world, we immediately become more social, and more connected, and more dependent on each other.

I think that when people go into virtual worlds, the sense of being physically near each other causes them to behave much better than they do, say, in email or instant messaging.

That's an interesting phenomenon.

>> RUSHKOFF: Rosedale holds up his own workplace as a model for this more intimate, more tender online culture.

>> So, you know, we all do sit open without any cubicles or anything here.

>> RUSHKOFF: He's instituted something called "The Love Machine," through which his employees send each other messages of encouragement online.

>> And we use it as a performance, like, it's how we track how we're all doing.

>> RUSHKOFF: They often hold their meetings around campfires or on sandy beaches in Second Life, even when they're sitting across the office from each other.

>> This is my desk.

There's not a whole lot to our real spaces anymore.

You know, all the big stuff is virtual.

My office in the virtual world is much cooler than this.

It's a big glass room with room for, like, ten people to sit down and talk at the same time.

>> RUSHKOFF: There's no phones ringing in here, though.

>> Yeah, you know, nobody uses phones anymore.

>> RUSHKOFF: What struck me most about Rosedale was his confidence that he could solve the alienation modern technology has helped to create with more technology.

>> Technology over the last, say, 50 years has mostly separated us.

We've gone from watching movies together to watching them in living rooms to watching them on iPods.

And I think that technology is now actually starting to bring us back together again.

Yeah, I think that's the right approach.

Does everybody agree?

One of the things that's unique about virtual reality is that unlike the Internet, you're not alone anymore.

>> RUSHKOFF: And he's got a point, at least in a way.

We are all together, out on the Internet, alone.

Or alone, out on the Internet, together, right?

I mean, do virtual worlds really bring us together with others or do they just make being utterly alone a little more bearable?

>> Hi everybody, I'm very happy all of you managed to join us.

We're going to teach you how to move around, how to walk around without bumping into people.

>> RUSHKOFF: These I.B.M.

employees are getting their first lesson in how to use Second Life.

>> The 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.

>> RUSHKOFF: The company is in the process of shifting many of its internal meetings into virtual worlds.

>> And hopefully make it almost as natural.

We're just putting the metrics in place, but we estimate that for all the meetings that we ran last year, we saved more than $1 million just by not flying to meetings.

>> So click the fly button, and what you'll notice is that you'll hover up in the air, and once you're in that hovering position, that means you're all ready to fly.

Very good, Scott.

Anybody else?

Don't be afraid.

>> How do I get down?

>> RUSHKOFF: But 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 videoconferencing and phone calls.

>> So that makes sense?

>> Okay.

>> Sounds good.

>> All right, let's head over there.

>> This technology will make it possible for me to work from home but still introduce this notion of being able to meet people, and... and be much more in the old workplace environment where, in fact, you did have a team around you that you would meet face to face.

And you would have ad-hoc meetings, you know, you'd go, "Okay, let's go to this conference room, let's have a cup of coffee."

You can almost do that virtually, while a lot of us are working remotely.

Hey, Fran, it's me.

I just don't have my agenda in front of me, so can you just read it to me, let me know what's up?

>> RUSHKOFF: Francoise Legoues lives with her husband, who also works for I.B.M., and their two dogs, in New York's Hudson Valley, about a half an hour's drive from the office.

>> They did it in Second Life, didn't they?

So how did it go?

I work from home maybe three days a week.

Well, that's great, actually.

So I could be in my office, but I'd be on the phone anyway.

>> Why don't we stand up and have this conversation?

>> Okay, so... >> We could go on sit in some of the chairs.

>> There are tables behind there?

>> Yeah, behind us.

>> I need to get better clothes for this meeting, because what I'm wearing, first, is boring, and I'm wearing same thing as Margot, and that just won't do.

>> I agree, I want my glasses back.

I tell you, I can't see anything.

(laughter) >> This immersive environment that the 3D Internet gives us is much more engaging, much more human in a way.

This is something that is going to change the way people communicate because it really does feel real.

Thank you everybody for joining from wherever you are.

>> RUSHKOFF: I.B.M.

built this office park in Westchester, New York, in the late 1980s as a hub for thousands of employees.

But today the place is like a ghost town.

It's as if no one actually works here.

They planned this place as an industrial age company where people would actually come to work in their cars and park, go into offices.

And now, basically everybody is either at home or in hotels or God knows where, logging in through their machines.

It's not that I.B.M.

let everybody go, right?

It's that everybody's just not here.

>> Yeah, 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.

>> RUSHKOFF: Could you tell us where you all are?

Where you're coming into this room from, in real space?

>> Like where do you really live, I guess is the question.

>> So, hi, this is Julie, based out of Burlington, Vermont.

>> Hi, this is Johan.

I'm living in Germany.

>> Hi, this is Arthur.

I'm from Campinas, a city near Sao Paolo, in Brazil.

>> RUSHKOFF: I mean, you've all met in real life one point or another, right?

>> Actually no, none of us have.

>> No.

>> No.

>> RUSHKOFF: But you're... this is your main team, right?

>> Yeah, actually we meet here every day, so this is how we know each other.

>> RUSHKOFF: As more of our real lives migrate to virtual spaces, there's a growing market for research exploring how we behave inside those spaces, as well as how our virtual experiences change us.

>> We use computer algorithms to do it automatically now.

This is a subject who is in the midst of an experiment right now.

She's wearing a head-mounted display that shows what you're seeing here.

>> RUSHKOFF: Jeremy Bailenson runs the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford.

>> She's actually seeing depth in stereo.

You can see that candy coming right into her mouth.

>> RUSHKOFF: His research shows how the distinctions between real and virtual are becoming blurred, even interchangeable.

>> Subjects would report afterwards being sick, being full.

>> RUSHKOFF: It's a subject of intense interest right now to the government, marketers, even the military, all of whom fund his work.

>> We're not wired to differentiate experiences like this one from actual eating, meaning digital stuff is such a new phenomenon that if it looks real and feels real, the brain tells us its real.

>> RUSHKOFF: And the identification gets even more profound when our avatars wear our real-life faces.

>> Okay, so no smiling.

>> RUSHKOFF: Bailenson was able to build an avatar that looked just like me in about 15 minutes.

>> So now we've built virtual Doug, I can have him say anything I want.

>> RUSHKOFF: And that's when the real fun begins.

>> In one study we made you ten centimeters taller than you actually were and had you conduct a negotiation with someone.

Having 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.

>> RUSHKOFF: And Bailenson found that advantage persists even after you leave the virtual world.

>> Regardless of our actual height, you'll then beat me face to face when we have a negotiation.

So, this stunned us.

A small exposure inside virtual reality carried over to their behavior face to face.

>> All right, your grandparents are going to leave for a little bit.

>> RUSHKOFF: But Bailenson's most stunning research involved kids.

He calls it the swimming with whales experiment.

>> Okay, well 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.

Do you remember swimming with the black and white fish, Fudgy and Buddy?

>> No.

>> No, you don't remember anything?

>> We've done studies with children when they see themselves swimming around with whales, in virtual reality, a week later half of them will believe that they've swam with whales.

>> RUSHKOFF: Kids actually believe that they've done this?

>> Absolutely.

About 50% of them will believe that in physical space they actually went to Sea World and swam with whales.

>> RUSHKOFF: Does that freak you out a little bit?

>> You know, people always ask me.

A lot of the stuff we do in the lab says that virtual experiences can profoundly affect you in wonderful and not so wonderful ways.

These experiences are happening and the world is rushing like a freight train towards digital stuff.

I just see it as where we're going.

>> RUSHKOFF: Undoubtedly, it is where we are going, and at the leading edge is the U.S. military.

Currently, they're using computer simulations to treat troops suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Sergeant Gerald Della Salla did a year's tour in Iraq and is now being treated with virtual reality therapy at the Manhattan V.A., one of over 40 centers around the country piloting the program.

>> That kind of pushed my stress level, recently, just with that last one, to six.

>> RUSHKOFF: It's still in clinical trials, but early results are encouraging.

>> Under certain circumstances, their whole posture will change.

They're leaning forward and they've got that gun, and you can see something's happening to them emotionally at that point.

>> That person on the bridge who's firing, we're firing back at them.

And ambush fire came around, and we basically continued through it.

>> Anxiety rating?

>> It's a five.

>> Over time, their brain is able to say, "Okay, this is uncomfortable, this is unpleasant, "but it's not a life-threatening situation."

I can tone down the level of anxiety and stress.

Anxiety rating?

>> It's good.

One.

>> Good work today, Jerry.

>> Technology is wrapped up in the story of war.

>> Ready, go!

>> You know, look at all the things that surround us, everything from the Internet to jet engines, these are all things where the military has been a driver for technology.

(yelling) And technology opens up new frontiers, new directions we can go in.

>> Clear!

>> Already clear!

Already clear!

>> But it also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer.

>> It looks like we might be taking fire at this time.

>> DRETZIN: One 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.

From air-conditioned rooms on this Air Force base in the desert outside of Las Vegas, pilots fly unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, that execute missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

>> Other aircraft, airspace, altitude.

Looks like we're by ourselves out here in Sector Three.

>> DRETZIN: Airmen here are required to wear flight suits to work, even though they sit 7,500 miles away from the battlefield.

It's one way of reminding these men that they are fighting a real war.

>> Every so often you have technologies that come along that rewrite the rules of the game.

Yet we don't talk about it.

Because it's costless to us.

>> DRETZIN: Drones have the capacity to strike with extraordinary precision, and at no cost to American lives.

The number of drones has multiplied in recent years, and the Pentagon is clamoring for more.

>> The risks are all one-way.

In today's wars, right now, the pilot gets to do all the shooting and never gets shot at.

And that creates a very different attitude than somebody who is both dealing out risk and is accepting risk.

>> Room, ten hut!

>> The biggest risk that we accept is that feeling of detachment from the aircraft.

You need to be able to think through a three-dimensional problem that's located 7,500 miles away from you.

Real live aircraft, real live weapons, doing a real mission.

I try to ensure that people understand there are people who are counting on us to do the mission.

You can fly in Afghanistan one day, and the very next day, you're flying in Iraq.

Though they're physically located here, they need to think in their mind, that they are in theater, because that's where the business end of that cockpit is.

You're no longer sitting at Creech Air Force base.

Get in that mindset.

When you step in that G.C.S., you are in the fight.

>> Like to confirm deadly, we have a single individual on the roof, on the north corner of that four-sided building.

>> DRETZIN: The planes' cameras can surveil their targets from up to nine miles overhead.

>> And it looks like he may be employing weapons at this time.

One time, we had intel that, there was a bad guy riding around on a motorcycle, if you will.

And, he was just riding around, and he stopped at two or three different playgrounds, and he's playing soccer with all these kids, you know.

And he's living his life.

He's doing his normal, everyday life.

And then, you know, sure enough, at the end of that ride, though, we found him at a meeting of bad people.

And it ended up resulting in a strike.

So you end up seeing what happens.

Copy that we got eyes on 'em.

Three-zero-five rifle, time of flight 15 seconds.

That's ten seconds.

Five, four, three, two, one, and splash.

>> They do take a lot of care about civilian casualties.

It is very much on their mind.

But, um, there's no way for them to really tell.

All they see is the bomb going into that building, and it blowing up.

They don't necessarily see what happens afterwards.

A drone can't dig through the rubble and see what the consequences of that Hellfire missile was.

They can't.

>> DRETZIN: Estimates vary as to the number of civilians killed in air strikes in Afghanistan, and the U .S.

and NATO forces don't publicly differentiate between manned and unmanned strikes in tracking civilian casualties.

We asked one of the pilots about it.

>> Yeah, I mean, everybody worries about things.

Alls you can do is... is you can make sure that you're prepared.

>> DRETZIN: So, you don't think you've ever hit someone you haven't intended to hit?

>> Uh, no.

I've...

I, uh, no.

In the morning, when I come to work, I pray.

I pray for strength, that God gives me strength, that He gives me wisdom.

And if my focus is on God, then everything else in my life, I've found, falls into place, so... >> Going to war has meant the same thing for over 5,000 years.

Going to war meant that you were going to a place where there was such danger you might never come home again, you might never see your family again.

Now compare that experience to that of a predator drone pilot.

You're sitting behind a computer screen, you're shooting missiles at enemy targets, you're killing enemy combatants, and then at the end of the day you get back in your car and 20 minutes later you're at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.

>> Hey, guys!

>> Daddy!

>> Hi.

You know, your family is not going to totally understand.

You can't explain everything to them.

That's a challenge in the job, that you've got to do that day in and day out.

>> I went to recess.

>> This disconnect of being at war and at home is very tough for the human mind to wrap itself around.

And we're finding that some of these drone pilots actually have combat stress and P.T.S.D.

even, just like the units physically deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan.

>> You got me!

>> DRETZIN: To unwind, airmen stationed at the base come here, to hang out and play video games.

>> Our younger folks definitely have skill sets that some of the older guys like me didn't have the luxury of.

They're definitely a technology generation.

They already understand computers.

It's almost intuitive for them.

>> DRETZIN: Last year, the Air Force trained the first class of drone pilots who weren't required to have any previous flying experience.

>> Two, three.

>> Three!

>> One, two, three.

>> Four!

>> You know, do you need to do 100 pushups if your job is to sit on your butt all day and program, or watch a camera from 4,000 miles away?

Do you necessarily need the same skills?

You know, maybe you just need to be a good hacker and have a big butt so you can sit in a chair all day.

>> Excuse me?

Can I get an XBox 360 controller, please?

>> RUSHKOFF: In 2008, the Army closed five recruiting centers in the Philadelphia area and replaced them with this.

>> How old are you?

>> 14.

>> RUSHKOFF: The $13 million, 14,500 square foot Army Experience Center.

>> Die!

>> RUSHKOFF: Here, kids 13 and up can play on one of dozens of XBoxes and PC gaming stations, for free.

>> They are simulated rifles; they are not real rifles.

>> DRETZIN: Recruiters mill about.

They can't recruit kids under 17, but they're encouraged to chat with them and answer their questions.

>> Did y'all sign up for our tournaments?

>> I've done them before.

>> Did you win?

>> I won like two.

>> You won two?

I think he's the best, man.

>> DRETZIN: It's a soft sell, a 21st century approach to recruiting, modeled in part on the Apple store.

>> Here 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.

But it is a sampling experience to pique your interest and maybe encourage you to go learn more, just as Apple is trying to do.

>> You killed him!

>> We have what young Americans want and they like.

>> Let's go find them and kill them.

>> They like video games, and that's why we're here.

>> Look, 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.

>> DRETZIN: Next to the gaming stations, the Army's built life-size simulators of Humvees and helicopters.

Critics 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.

(gunfire sounds) >> I've never seen a place like this before, so it caught my attention.

I thought it was amazing.

(gunfire sounds) I 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," so I talked to one of the recruiters, signed up for the Army.

I left in two weeks.

Don't regret my decision since.

>> Shame, shame, shame!

War is not a game!

>> DRETZIN: Protesters accuse the Army of blurring the lines between game and reality, virtual war and real war.

>> Close it down!

>> I'm the 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.

I mean there is no reset button in war.

>> This is your third and final warning.

>> Shut it down!

>> You're under arrest.

>> Shut it down!

>> Certainly video games are not like warfare.

I think most kids are smart enough to understand that.

That, you know, what's going on in Iraq is not virtual reality.

>> DRETZIN: We asked some of the kids about that.

>> I really don't get confused.

You know, it's just all fictional.

I killed you!

I mean, it's fun, but it's nothing like the real thing.

Ooh, no way.

You got sniped, how do you like it now?

>> It's a video game.

Doesn't make anybody want to shoot anybody, I don't think.

Never did for me or any of my friends.

Like, I don't think it's real, I don't think it makes me want to go out there and do combat any more than anything else does.

>> People 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.

I 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.

But kids have that ability, to move kind of seamlessly between the digital and the real.

>> Where's your controller?

>> DRETZIN: Katie Salen writes about the theory and design behind video games.

>> Who has a theory about why this controller... >> DRETZIN: She's so convinced of the value of these games for kids that she helped create a New York City public school organized around them.

>> This is not an ordinary school.

It's something new.

This school is all about how we learn through games.

>> Okay, so go to game label.

>> That's what we did last time, and it didn't work.

>> I know.

There's bugs in this program, aren't there?

>> Yes, I know.

>> DRETZIN: It's a radical model, using gaming as a lens for the entire curriculum, from geography to physics.

>> I am a pair of forces that are equal and opposite.

You have one minute.

>> Games get us an incredibly engaging learning experience.

Often 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, and the fact that kids today are playing video games.

Which people think means they have attention deficit disorder, that they are not really doing things in a very deep way, but that actually isn't the case.

>> I couldn't beat that.

>> When kids are playing games, they are engaged in a way that's incredibly similar to when they're engaged in reading a book.

That game world is equally rich, I would argue, to many novels.

What it comes down to, if you can't engage that kid in wanting to learn something, you really have a problem on your hands.

>> DRETZIN: Not everyone agrees with her.

>> You see schools where they say, "Look, kids are different, they come in today different, "we have to play with them, otherwise we'll lose them.

We have to meet them on their own terms."

It's complete hogwash.

We've got to slow down and stop, and schools are one of the few institutions we have in our society where you can have a sustained conversation about something without being bombarded and distracted by all these machines.

We have to protect that.

>> Right click it.

>> DRETZIN: It may be too early to know the answer.

We grew up in a world anchored in pages you turn.

Maybe there's something these kids are getting that we aren't sure how to value yet.

>> I'm going to need one more.

He's right there.

Yes!

>> You know, there were people who complained when we moved from horses to cars.

There were people who complained when we moved from letters to the telephone.

And it's not that they're wrong totally, because things get lost.

So you might have less memory, we don't have as flowery writing.

But we gain other things, and life moves on.

>> DRETZIN: And as we move on, I wonder what we'll hold on to, and what we'll end up leaving behind.

>> Technology challenges us to assert our human values.

Which means that, first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

That's not so easy.

Technology isn't good or bad.

It's powerful, and it's complicated.

Take advantage of what it can do.

Learn what it can do.

But also ask, "What is it doing to us?"

We're going to slowly, slowly find our balance, but I think it's going to take time.

>> DRETZIN: These are your students?

>> RUSHKOFF: Yeah, though sometimes I feel more like I'm their student.

Digital technology continues to extend into every area of our lives.

Yet 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.

But 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...

I mean, a lot of these projects are trying to help people gain some perspective.

...to find other people... >> DRETZIN: That is cool.

>> RUSHKOFF: ...to remake the world on their own terms.

So I guess that means you can still count me among the believers.

I love the possibilities of a digital life.

I love being able to experience the world through other people's eyes.

I love being able to broadcast a story across the country from home, in my underpants.

I love being able to imagine almost any possible future, and to do so with other people.

Millions of them, right along side me.

But most of all, I love being able to turn it off.

>>This report continues on Frontline'swebsite.

>> I love the internet.

>>Watch more of the personal stories from hundreds of contributors.

>> I can't remember a line, great, I just go online, and there it is in front of me.

>> There was a massive power outage.

Just being without the juice, we actually talked to each other.

>>And please send us your stories.

>> Even though you can technically call me a digital native, I try to be relatively tech-free.

>>Dive into a year's worth of reporting on digital life.

>> Philip clearly had a vision from the beginning.

>>Read extended interviews.

>> The point of it is to be our most creative selves.

>> If you can't engage that kid in wanting to learn something... >>Check out Douglas Rushkoff's ongoing conversations with experts and the public.

Watch the program online and join the discussion at pbs.org.

>>Next time on Frontline... How inexperienced pilots... >> They wanted to find a way of getting rid of that expensive employee.

>>...and cutting corners on safety... >> If we didn't move those airplanes, they didn't make any money.

>>...and inadequate regulation... >> The F.A.A.

protects airlines.

>>...led to a tragic crash that exposed the risks... >> There were no survivors.

>>...of "Flying Cheap."

Watch Frontline.

>> Frontlineis made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

With major funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Helping to build a more just, verdant and peaceful world.

And additional funding from the Park Foundation.

Major funding for "Digital Nation" brought to you by: >>The Verizon Foundation.

Empowering educators, parents and students with innovative tools and resources to navigate in a broadband world.

To learn more, visit verizonfoundation.org.

>> This is PBS.