Does Instant Messaging Adversely Affect Our Ability to Think Deeply? Are Our Youth at Risk?



I mentor a young man in another country. We use Facebook Messenger a lot for free communication across borders on the other side of the world. I perceive he has a problem that I suspect might well be also negatively impacting our youth who instant message almost constantly.

I have a theory that his using Facebook Messenger so much and communicating with many people, that he loses track of things he needs to do simply due to being distracted. Messenger is very inefficient in terms of time use. It is also very bad for keeping track of things, as messages get lost in the long strings of messages. Messages are usually short and devoid of much information. Also, information is so fragmented that it is hard to see where a complete thought or plan is. That is why I want to move communication between him and me more to e-mail (and to using Google Tasks for a To Do list). There, a more robust explanation can be given or a more complete description written. This is hard to do in any length on a cell phone (at least it is for me), so much of this will need to be done on the computer, rather than on the cell phone.

 Stephen Covey in his 1994 book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" wrote about the difference between urgent and important. He used a matrix something like this:

How this applies to this discussion is that many consider a text message as urgent, as something that needs to be answered immediately, If it is also not important, looking at the matrix you see that it moves from being a not-so-good "interruption" to being a real "distraction" from what is either (1) "urgent and important" that is worthy of immediate attention or (2) "important but not urgent" which warrants planning to do in the not so distant future. If the important things are not attended to, much productivity and effectiveness is lost.

 What do you think? Is this a problem with our youth? Are they distracted from what they need to do? Is their communication robust in terms of complete thoughts or fragmented? Does this have long-term impacts on their ability to analyze problems and issues comprehensively? Or will they have the habit of reacting to headlines and slogans reflexively instead of being wise users of information? Will this lead to shallow thinking?

I'd love to hear what you think.

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