Ellen Rose (2011)

A media ecology perspective on multimedia and cognition:  Is multimedia making us stupid? (2011)

Grounded in the interdisciplinary perspective of media ecology, this paper offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between multimedia and cognition.  Working from the basic premise that media and technologies play an important role in shaping human habits of mind and social organizations, media ecologists contend that our modes of communication form an “information environment.”  Multimedia is now in the process of becoming not a spectacle to be marveled at but an unquestioned and ubiquitous element of the contemporary information environment.  From a media ecology perspective, this means that the question we must ask about multimedia is not only how we can use it to support learning, but also how continual engagement with a ubiquitous multimedia subtly alters cognitive patterns and propensities—in other words, how we think.  Research suggests that, as multimedia plays an increasingly central role in our daily communications and thought, it contributes to an emergent cognitive style of fragmented attention and superficial reading, while eroding our capability for sustained reflection.  Education is offered as the primary means by which students can be helped to achieve an epistemological distance from their information environment, which will allow them to think critically about the role of multimedia in their lives.

Ellen Rose is a Professor of Education at the University of New Brunswick, where she held the McCain-Aliant Chair of Multimedia and Instructional Design from 2001 to 2010.  She is the author of two books and numerous articles on educational computing, the social effects of technology, and instructional design.  Her current research includes a SSHRC-funded study which uses hermeneutic phenomenology and media ecology as lenses through which to explore professors’ and students’ experiences of teaching and learning within Blackboard and other Learning Management Systems.