On November 6, 2013, Steve Chawkins writes in the Los Angeles Times:
When Clifford Nass moved to a Stanford Universityfreshman residence hall as a “dorm dad” in 2007, he wasn’t quite prepared for college life in the 21st century. Even as a professor who for decades had studied the interaction of humans and computers, he was caught off-guard when one of his students explained why she was texting her boyfriend just down the hall.
“It’s more efficient,” she said.
Then there was a familiar sight Nass continued to find astonishing. In lounges, in libraries, just about everywhere, he gazed at a legion of the perennially plugged-in: They chatted on cellphones, scanned Facebook, watched videos, blasted out tweets, and maybe even thumbed through a calculus text or a history of the modern world, all at once.
“I thought: Wow, that’s pretty awesome,” he told the Boston Globe in 2011. “What do they know that I don’t know, and how can I be like that?”
The answers surprised him.
Nass, a sociologist, was among the first academics to sound alarms about the dangers of chronic multitasking and the decline in the kind of face-to-face interactions that he so unabashedly enjoyed with students and colleagues.
http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-clifford-nass-20131107,0,3189434.story#axzz2kBIVTz18
