Cyberspace and physical space Attention structures in computer-mediated communication

Chapter 7 Cyberspace and Physical Space: Attention Structures in Computer Mediated Communication Rodney H. Jones Mr. Lam is a secondary school English teacher in Hong Kong. His school, like nearly every school in the territory, is equipped with a ‘Multimedia Learning Center’ (MMLC), but Mr. Lam never uses it. ‘When you take your class there,’ he says, ‘it’s a constant battle for their attention. They go crazy in the MMLC.’ Another teacher agrees. ‘As soon as they come into contact with computers, the class is out of control.’ For some teachers, the problem goes beyond controlling students in the MMLC. Computers, they insist, have even made it more difficult for them to manage their ordinary classrooms. ‘It’s the on-line games,’ one insists. ‘They can’t pay attention to anything else. They fall asleep in class.’ Many popular and scholarly treatments of computer mediated communication in recent years have focused on how computers have ‘despatialized’ communication (Katriel, 1999), allowing us to communicate over vast distances and interact in virtual environments whose spatial characteristics differ considerably from the physical world, environments in which we can, for all intents and purposes, leave physical space and our physical bodies behind (Haraway, 1991; Turkle, 1995). What the quotations above illustrate, however, is that among the most profound effects of these technologies is the way they have altered spatial configurations and social relationships in the physical spaces – classrooms, living rooms and offices – where people use computers. One domain in which these changes have been most dramatic has been education, where the presence of computers has significantly changed the way teachers and students orient themselves towards the physical spaces of classrooms and lecture halls. From the point of view of teachers like those quoted above, these changes have been less than successful. Central to their concerns is the effect they perceive the presence of computers has on students’ ability to pay sufficient attention to what is going on in the physical world around them, a fear that is reflected in both popular and scholarly treatments of the computer use of young people (Hembrooke and Gay, 2003; Healy, 1998; Jensen et al., 1997). Similar concerns about attention have been raised regarding the effect of computers on the space of the home, where they are blamed for isolating children from their parents and the day-to-day activities of family life (DeGaetano, 2004; AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 151 11/2/2009 12:45:43 PM 152 Semiotic Landscapes Lau and Au, 2002; Winn, 2002). Many parents and teachers feel as if they are engaged, in the words of Mr. Lam, in a ‘constant battle’ for young people’s attention, and their adversary in this battle is technology itself. These attitudes partly have their source in wider media and educational discourses about computer mediated communication linking it to a decline in literacy, cognitive ability and moral standards (Thurlow, 2006). This paper examines the ways teenagers in Hong Kong use computers at home and in school and the effect it has on the ways they orient themselves towards these physical spaces and other people who are present in them. It takes as a central aspect of this phenomenon the very concern raised above – the impact of computers on students’ ability to ‘pay attention’ – and in so doing, argues that the key to understanding the relationship between computers and the physical world is understanding the role of ‘attention’ in the social construction of space. The data for my discussion comes from a participatory ethnographic study of computers and youth literacy in Hong Kong, which involved tracing the in-school and out-of-school literacy practices of 50 secondary school students (aged 14–17) for 6 months. The kinds of data collected include diaries, screen movies of participants’ computer use, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with students, teachers and parents, and onsite and video observations of teenagers using computers in various in-school and out-of-school settings. The methodological framework for the study comes from mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris and Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001; Scollon and Wong Scollon, 2004), an approach which examines the role of discourse and other mediational means (for example, computers, telephones, furniture and seating arrangements) in affecting the kinds of social actions that people can take, and thus the kinds of identities and social relationships they can construct. The difference between a mediated discourse approach to computer use and other discursive work in computer mediated communication (see for example Danet and Herring , 2007; Herring , 1996) is that rather then focusing primarily on discourse, MDA begins by asking what actions are being taken by participants and how discourse is (or is not) being used to take them. Space and attention structures All actions take place in multiple and overlapping spaces, built spaces, geographical spaces, political spaces, personal spaces, spaces that extend inward to the innermost spaces of our bodies, and outward through rooms, buildings, cities, nations and beyond, spaces that extend across biological, physical and social processes (Scollon, 2005). This is not, however, the way we experience space. Through our actions, we make space finite by inscribing onto it a sphere or ‘circumference’ of operation with our attention. For Lefebvre (1991), this ‘lived space’ of activities occurs as an interaction of ‘perceived space’ (l’espace perçu), the material objects that exist in the world and their relationship with AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 152 11/2/2009 12:45:44 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 153 one another, and ‘conceived space’ (l’espace conçu), the mental conceptions and symbolic representations we have of space. But ‘lived space’, what Lefebvre calls ‘third space’, is more than just the overlay of mind onto matter. It is conceived in social actions and determinant of what kinds of social actions can be taken in it. It is not something we inhabit; it is something we ‘do’. And it is not, something that we do alone. Spaces are constructed not just through the objects and boundaries that surround us and the habitual ways we conceive of them, but also through interaction with others who are operating in the ‘same’ space. Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004) call these three elements of social space the discourses in place (the physical/semiotic setting), the interaction order (the social relationships among participants) and the historical body (the life experiencesmemories, learning, skills and plans) of the individuals. Each of these elements helps to determine how we ‘live’ space by structuring our attention in particular ways that make some kinds of social actions possible and others impossible. In an earlier paper (Jones, 2005), I argued that attention is a vital component in the way we experience and interact with space – both physical and virtual – and built upon Lanham’s (1993) notion of ‘attention structures’ – socially and technologically mediated ‘frames’ or ‘organizers’ which result from the interaction of the discourses in place, the interaction order, and the historical body. ‘Attention’, I proposed not as a mere cognitive construct, but also a social one; all social interaction has its basis in conventions for giving, getting and displaying attention. ‘Attention structures’, then, consist of both cognitive frameworks and social frameworks for distributing and attracting attention. Discourses in place or the physical environments in which we take actions channel, block or amplify our attention with walls, windows, doors and furniture as well as with written or spoken texts, images, sounds and the technologies through which they are delivered. Interaction orders channel our attention through socially developed ways of ‘paying attention’ to different kinds of people and in different sorts of social situations. Finally, the experiences stored within our historical bodies help us to determine which facets of different situations require focal attention and which facets can be backgrounded. Through learning, our historical bodies also allow us to not pay attention to particular aspects of a social action in order to be able to distribute our attention more efficiently (Schmidt, 2001). The ways each of these elements channels our attention and allows us to undertake particular social actions are dynamically determined by the way they interact with the other elements. The habits of ‘paying attention’ in an individual’s historical body are built up through contact with various discourses in place and various interaction orders. The ways we manage attention in interaction depends on the history of interactions between individuals and within particular places. And physical environments are often designed to accommodate or enforce particular interaction orders or the plans schemes or habits of particular historical bodies. At the same time, attention structures within these three elements can also work at cross-purposes. You may, for example, have developed within your historical body an attention structure for crossing the street in one country which you find slightly out of synch with the attention structure embodied in AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 153 11/2/2009 12:45:44 PM 154 Semiotic Landscapes the environment and social conventions of another place, or the attention structure embodied in your relationship with the person with whom you are crossing the street might cause you to disregard or even behave at odds with the discourses in place or your own inclinations. In other words, the attention structures embodied in these three elements of a mediated action can be, to a certain degree, either in or out of ‘synch’ with one another. The process of understanding how computers change the ways physical spaces are experienced, then, involves understanding something about the physical spaces themselves and the objects in them, the interactions that occur in these spaces, and at the habitual ways the individuals involved conceive of space. Hollaway and Valentine (2003) theorize that young people build their identities by travelling across three main social spaces: home, school and cyberspace, and that children’s online actions are invariably affected by the discourses and interactions in these other spaces. And so this analysis will begin with the home space, and then consider the school space, examining how the physical, social and embodied aspects of these spaces interact with what we have come to call ‘cyberspace’. Students’ computer use at home In Hong Kong apartments are small. The average floor space per person is 7.10 square meters (as opposed to 20 in Singapore and nearly 16 in Tokyo) (Chan et al., 2002). In most of the households we visited computers were placed not in children’s rooms, but in the living area of the apartment where family members congregated to eat meals, watch TV, play mahjongg and converse (Figures 7.1 and 7.2 which show opposite ends of the same living space). Use of Figure 7.1 Jason’s living room (view A) AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 154 11/2/2009 12:45:44 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 155 the computer was often shared among family members, with children being the primary users. Thus, when they are operating their computers, the discourses in place towards which young people’s attention is typically directed exist not just in the circumference of the screen. They also include family conversations and activities taking place around them in which they have various levels of involvement, as well as other media in the environment, such as written texts like newspapers, magazines and school textbooks, and other electronic media such as telephones, radios and television sets. Four students in the study were asked to install webcams and to take movies of themselves using their computes. What is striking about these movies is the amount of time their gaze is not on the computer screen but directed at something else in their immediate environment. In a total of 738 minutes of webcam data, students were looking away from their screens for 198 minutes, more than a quarter of the time they were seated in front of their computers. The amount of attention they gave to these discourses in material space varied widely depending on the activities they were engaged in online and the activities that were taking place in the physical space. The initiation of an interaction by a co-present other (e.g. a parent or sibling), the ringing of their mobile phone or the start of their favourite television program sometimes took their attention briefly away from their screen. Often though, they were able to participate in family conversations and activities, chat with friends on the telephone and attend to what was going on on TV without taking their attention away from their screens. In other words, the demands made by discourses in place more often than not make operating a computer for these students a polyfocal add 's' (screens) Figure 7.2 Jason’s living room (view B) AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 155 11/2/2009 12:45:45 PM Replace forthcoming with 2009 156 Semiotic Landscapes activity. By polyfocal I mean not that they were able to focus on many things at exactly the same time, but that their attention shifted rather rapidly among multiple activities in a complex cognitive and social dance (Jones, forthcoming). Even when students’ computers were isolated in their bedrooms, the demands of their immediate physical environments persisted, with computer use often accompanied by television watching, phone conversations and the occasional intervention of family members. In fact, students’ rooms were typically even more ‘media rich’ than their family living rooms (Steele and Brown, 1995), equipped with various portable media like ipods and mobile phones, and with walls plastered with photos, posters, maps and other texts – a visual expression of their polyfocal attention (Figure 7.3). Just as the physical environment normally offered multiple foci of attention, the space of the students’ computer screens was normally not treated as a single focus of attention, but a series of overlapping and interested foci, with different programs open in different windows and multiple tasks being performed at once. Students regularly combined ‘doing homework’ with web-browsing, engaging in multiple instant messaging conversations, reading and contributing to message boards, online diaries or blogs, writing and drawing on ‘flash boards’, visiting chat rooms, downloading and sharing (mostly pirated) music, videos and software through websites and peer to peer applications, and playing online games. The discourses in place of students’ home computer use, then, created a series of overlapping and interested spatial and interactional contexts Figure 7.3 Kitty’s bedroom AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 156 11/2/2009 12:45:46 PM Delete semi-colon Cyberspace and Physical Space 157 across which practices were polychronically (Hall, 1959) distributed over a wide array of activities at once, with multiple tasks in progress; simultaneously. Practices were almost always parts of ‘event complexes’ in which attention was distributed over various online and offline spaces, making it difficult to discuss one particular practice in isolation, or sometimes even to understand what constituted a practice, where a practice began and ended. When asked how much time they spent on instant messaging in a particular week, for example, most participants in our study could not answer, saying things like: ‘How do I know? The program is on all the time.’ These practices were also often interconnected, with offline conversations ‘resemiotized’ (Iedema, 2001) into words and symbols in chat windows, phone conversations, blog entries, exchanges of files from one computer to another, online gaming sessions or homework assignments. The presence of computers also altered the interaction order, both in the immediate spaces of students’ homes and in the wider geographical spaces of their neighbourhoods and city. Despite concerns that adolescent computer use isolates young people from their families (DeGaetano, 2004; Lau and Au, 2002), research has shown that the actual situation is much more complicated. For example, in a recent survey of over 200 families in Korea, Lee and Chae (2007) found that while respondents perceived computer use as resulting in declines in family time, they did not perceive a negative affect on family communication. In fact, communication around computer use and co-use by family members was seen to improve family communication. This was also borne out in our own observations. Not only did our participants frequently communicate with family members while using computers and often used computers together with parents and siblings (to play games, shop or search for information of mutual interest), computers also afforded children (who usually knew more about them than their parents) opportunities to assume ‘identities of expertise’ in their families (Holloway and Valentine, 2003). Adolescents were often called upon to assist their parents in dealing with technical problems and to help them with online tasks such as paying bills and investing in stocks, activities in which, in the absence of computers, adolescents are not normally included. At the same time, computers were also used by our participants as ‘boundary objects’, allowing them to shield certain activities from their parents, giving them a sense of ‘privacy’ heretofore impossible in such cramped living arrangements. An instant messaging conversation with a friend or romantic interest, for example, is much easier to conceal from co-present others than a phone conversation. The best thing about ICQ (a popular instant messaging program), one participant noted, is that ‘no one will know what we are talking about and doing in ICQ.’ Thus, computer mediated communication functioned as what Leander (2005) has called a ‘boundary practice’ – a practice which facilitates the management of boundaries (and identities) between different social worlds (home, school, shopping centres, circles of friends), enabling users to extend the territory upon which they could act into realms in which parents and AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 157 11/2/2009 12:45:47 PM 158 Semiotic Landscapes siblings had no access and could not police. While this fact sometimes caused some consternation among parents who wondered what their children were doing online, they also saw some benefits: rather than forcing students out of the home, computers allowed students to engage in activities and relationships they did not wish to share with their parents without leaving the physical proximity (and safety) of their families. Computers also have a profound effect on the way these students operate in the physical/social spaces that extend beyond the walls of their crowded apartments. Perhaps the biggest error in approaches which bifurcate physical space and cyberspace and conclude that computers isolate students from the physical world (see for example Kraut et al., 1998; Kroker and Weinstein, 1994) is that they ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with whom students communicate online are people (friends, classmates, relatives) with whom they regularly have face to face interaction, sometimes on a daily basis. Nearly all research that has looked in detail at this relationship has found that the vast majority of people who engage in computer mediated communication regard it as an extension of their ‘real-life’ social interactions rather than as separate from them, that, far from propelling users into ‘cyberspace’, the effect of CMC is more often to ground them more firmly within their existing material communities and circumstances (Hamman, 1998, 1999; Holloway and Valentine, 2003; Orleans and Laney, 2000). Similarly, observations of our participants made it clear that rather than isolating them from the physical world it expanded their immediate sense of physical space as they populated their computer screens with interactions with friends and classmates most often residing in close geographical proximity. IM contact lists constituted social gatherings in which interactants enacted ‘presence’ on multiple computer screens located throughout geographical space, gatherings which, although ‘virtual’ in nature, most often had important consequences in the physical world. At the same time, computers again acted as ‘boundary objects,’ helping users better manage their social relationships. The discourses in place of IM interfaces, for example, provided various affordances and constraints for managing social and relational spaces and distributing attention through them, allowing users to modulate their presence through adjusting their online ‘status,’ indicating, for example that they were free for chat, busy or temporarily away from their computers or choosing to be ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ to selected parties. In many ways computer mediated communication was not so much about ‘communicating’ for our participants as it was about distributing and attracting social attention. As online and offline interactions and relationships blended and interactants played with the new media’s unique ability to convey who was directing attention towards whom, computer mediated communication came to reflect the attention structures of interaction orders that extend over online and offline spaces. IM contact lists and strategies for managing them, for example, resemiotize aspects of students’ social relationships: who’s in; who’s out; who is more deserving of attention; who gets assigned ‘invisible’. AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 158 11/2/2009 12:45:47 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 159 The attention structures inscribed in the discourses in place and enacted in social relationships interact with and affect the attention structures that develop in the historical bodies of users. Our participants had years of practice in distributing attention over multiple interactions and tasks. These attention structures, which they take for granted, are perhaps best understood by looking at historical bodies where they have not been developed: those of their teachers. One teacher, for example, described her experience engaging in IM interactions with her students like this: It was a mixture of feelings. I was very busy and almost unable to handle the chaotic situation when about ten dialogue boxes appeared on the screen simultaneously. My fingers were trembling and I didn’t know which one to click on . . . my students said that I was a ‘low B’ (not very intelligent) in handling the confusion that the IM messages had created. Students, however, were more accustomed to the multi-tasking which computers not only enabled but almost required. One participant claimed: I have no trouble studying and memorizing things, chatting with my friends and playing online games. I think it works quite well. Faster. As I have to think while playing games. I have already started thinking, thinking how to type. My brain is already functioning. So it is faster and easier for me to study. These polyfocal attention structures in the historical bodies of these students are stored not as information, but as intuition as, knowledge ‘built into the movements, bodies and unconscious ways of thinking (users) have built up through repeated practice’ (Gee, 2003: 110). It is the ‘embodied’ nature of home computer use that makes the attention structures that it develops so different from those that develop around the ‘disembodied’ and abstract information that is often part of school-based learning. When engaging in IM conversations or playing online games, students felt that their attention was always situated in clear material and social contexts (Gee, 2003; Tynes, 2007). The management and focus of attention had constant and immediate consequences on the ‘physical’ world of the game or the social world of their peer groups in ways that it did not in many school-based practices like doing ‘exercises’, writing essays or taking examinations. Users were involved in ‘embodied stories’ (Gee, 2003), and the ‘embodied’ quality of practices like ‘fragging’ (i.e. killing) an opponent in an online game or arguing with one’s boyfriend over IM were palpable. Students’ computer use at school The ways computers are integrated into school-based literacy practices for these students created very different orientations towards physical space than those AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 159 11/2/2009 12:45:47 PM Semiotic Landscapes 160 observed in their homes. For one thing, most school-based literacy practices – and the policies that inform them – promote fundamentally different expectations about attention. Far from the polyfocal orientation discussed above, students in school were expected to pay attention to only one thing at a time, and for longer periods. This monofocal orientation is enforced by the panopticon style settings (Foucault, 1977) of traditional classrooms in which the physical environment, social relationships and the habitual practices of participants channel attention towards the teacher. Conventions for gaining and granting attention are also built into the interaction order of classrooms, which include conventions like teachers electing students for attention or students inviting it by raising their hands. Attention giving or attention seeking outside of this rather strict economy is seen as disruptive. ‘Multimedia Learning Centers’ (MMLCs) were established in the territory’s secondary schools to enhance interactive and experiential learning, but despite the Hong Kong government’s enthusiastic commitment to making IT an integral part of teaching, computer-equipped classrooms remain underused (Hong Kong Dept. of Education, 2001) for many of the reasons related by teachers in the beginning of this chapter. In particular, teachers feel that the presence of computers is a ‘distraction’ from learning. Consequently, many of the teachers we talked to avoided using these facilities. When asked what she thought the purpose of the MMLC was in her school, one student replied, ‘I think the main purpose of it is to show it to parents on parents’ day.’ When they did use these facilities, teachers usually worked to design activities in which students used computers in the most restrictive ways possible if at all. Another student remarked: It’s like the classroom. The only difference is that we have a computer in front of us. Sometimes, she may type something outside and we see. She controls our computers. We only see. You can never use the computer Replace 'This'Wewith throughout the class. only sit and see. 'The' This particular lesson I will analyze here involved secondary 3 (grade 9) students in an English class. The class used the MMLC about once a fortnight in response to a regulation imposed by the school administration. Usually these forays to the MMLC involved working through exercises on a multimedia CD-ROM called Planet English, filling in online grammar exercises, watching movies or practising ‘speaking’ (which usually meant pronunciation). On the occasion of our observation, the students were instructed to read a passage from their textbooks into a microphone and then listen to it through their computers. At the end of the lesson the teacher played back some students’ attempts for the class to discuss. In this class students sat at long tables arranged in rows on either side of a central aisle, each seat fitted with a computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse. The teacher’s desk and computer were situated in the front of the room. In other words, the discourses in place in the form of the layout of the class mirror AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 160 11/2/2009 12:45:47 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 161 almost exactly the arrangement of the traditional panopticon classroom. At the same time, however, the ability of the teacher to use this layout to monitor students was limited by the computer screens, which shielded students from scrutiny, making it necessary for the teacher to situate herself in the aisle to see what they were doing (a position that made it impossible for her to make use of the computer monitoring system on her own screen at the front of the class). Furthermore, penetrating the rows of computers to reach students farther away from the aisle was nearly impossible (Figures 7.4 and 7.5). Figure 7.4 MMLC – view from rear Figure 7.5 MMLC – view from front AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 161 11/2/2009 12:45:47 PM 162 Semiotic Landscapes Another important discourse in place in this classroom was the text that the students were meant to recite: a passage from their print textbook about pandas. Unlike the texts students were accustomed to interacting with online, this printed text was linear and monologic. In this particular activity, students were primarily engaged with the text on a phonological level – the text was treated as a collection of symbols to be transformed into sounds; the meaning of the text was inconsequential. For most of the lesson, the majority of students’ gazes were directed down at this text, which they had to hold in their hands because the desk space in front of them was taken up by their computer monitors (Figure 7.6). In contrast, the aspect of the discourses in place which normally one would expect to be central in such settings, the text displayed on the computer screen, here is also practically inconsequential. Students’ screens showed simply an interface designed to look like the controls of a tape recorder (Figure 7.7). Figure 7.6 The textbook Figure 7.7 The computer screen AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 162 11/2/2009 12:45:49 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 163 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the discourses in place in this situation is that they had very little to do with one another; the meaning of the room filled with computer equipment, the meaning of the teacher’s movements throughout the room, the meaning of the text students were reading, and the meaning of the words and symbols on their screens appeared to be totally divorced from one another. The actions participants were meant to take with these discourses in place were disconnected from the meanings expressed in the texts themselves, and seemed to have little to do with the way such discourses are used to take actions in ‘real’ social practices (where we do not normally read to our computers). Rather than being used for practices computers are used for in their everyday world, in this and other lessons we observed, computers were appropriated into ‘old-literacy’ practices, turned into tape recorders, written texts and fill in the blank exercises. Thus, the spaces constructed by computers were domesticated and ‘rewired’ by conventional pedagogical discourses (Leander, 2005). One of our participants remarked, ‘we have listening in MMLC. But it has nothing to do with computers.’ Another put it perhaps most succinctly when he said simply, ‘Our teacher uses computers to teach book stuff.’ The interaction order in this situation was based chiefly on surveillance. The teacher’s physical and virtual monitoring of activities helped give shape to the students’ attention as they performed or resisted performing (Figures 7.8 and 7.9) the assigned task. The task dictated that they interact only with the teacher or with themselves in the form of a recording of their own voice. Through this analysis I do not mean to dismiss the pedagogical value of recoding and listening to one’s pronunciation, nor am I trying to suggest that interesting and interactive lessons which keep students ‘on-task’ cannot be performed in physical spaces like these. In fact, that is what they are designed for. AQ: The captions for Figures 7.8 and 7.9 are same. Okay? Figure 7.8 MMLC Yes, that's okay. AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 163 11/2/2009 12:45:50 PM 164 Semiotic Landscapes Figure 7.9 MMLC This cannot happen, however, as long as practices in these rooms attempt to impose attention structures from traditional classroom spaces and traditional literacy practices that fundamentally contradict the orientations towards space characteristic of computer mediated communication. Educational activities which fail to recognize and exploit this kind of interaction are fundamentally ‘out-of-synch’ with the discourses in place and the interaction orders implicit in the technology and with the attention structures students have built up in their historical bodies through years of using computers. Conclusion The point I have tried to make in this chapter is that physical space is primarily a social achievement. It is not just a matter of material objects (like computers) or of individual cognitive processes, but a product of the interaction among the material, social and psychological worlds of social interactants. The problem of attention in such physical spaces as these classrooms is not the fault of the individuals, and not the fault of the computers, but the result of a complex nexus of overlapping and competing attention structures in the discourses in place, the interaction order, and the historical bodies of participants which are reflected in broader discursive formations around architecture. Attention structures not only work to orient us towards different aspects of space; in very fundamental ways they shape our social identities and social relationships. The actions that we perform with others create the spaces that we AJaworski_07_Fpp.indd 164 11/2/2009 12:45:51 PM Cyberspace and Physical Space 165 inhabit with them, and the ways we orient towards space makes some actions more possible and some less possible. The monochronic orientation towards space evidenced by the teachers and parents in this study seems to lend itself to more transactional exchanges in which computers are constructed as a means for transferring information (knowledge, money and goods), whereas the more polychromic orientation evidenced by students lends itself to more relational exchanges in which social formations are established and maintained and computers are seen primarily as a means of communication and social networking (Thurlow, 2007). As homes and schools become increasingly media rich (Livingstone, 2002), the competing attention structures associated with these media increasingly characterizes relationships between young people and adults. Spaces in which competing attention structures overlap are sites of social struggle in which people reproduce or resist particular social positions. Fairclough (1992) argues that in cases where different situations create the need for diverse positionings; people either accept and modify their behaviour to cope with each setting or they struggle and contest for change. For the MMLC students in this study, one strategy for contesting the positioning imposed on them was to simply ‘switch off’ their attention in much the same way their teachers had ‘switched off’ their computers in attempts to combat distraction. This disconnect, which pervades physical spaces (home vs school), textual spaces (the generic practices of textbooks vs those of new media texts), and social spaces (interpersonal relationships vs institutional relationdelete ships), creates a vicious circle of disengagement, disinterest, frustration and distrust. 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