Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, presented a lecture Wednesday evening about the growing danger of consumer technology and trivial distraction to students and society.

“Screen Culture, I contend, is omnipresent and distracting; so much so, that it has displaced us from our communities, creating an ‘interpersonal divide,'” Bugeja said.

“Screen Culture” deals with the pervasion of trivial news items people seemingly cannot get enough of and the conglomeration of condensation of the corporate media world.

“In 1983, 50 companies controlled most of the world’s media. By 2003, there were six,” he said.

Gaming consoles, iPods, televisions, DVD players, TiVo, mobile social software services and other electronics intended to entertain and distract also provide profits for the corporations that produce them, conditioning people to expect instant electronic gratification and conditioning students to feel frustrated when presented with a critical thinking problem, Bugeja said.

“In 1985, according to national data, 26 percent of students were bored regularly. That figure is now 41 percent,” he said.

All the electronics people use, Bugeja said, are not in and of themselves bad, but technology has a tendency to take over everything it touches.

“Apply technology to the economy, and the economy henceforth is about technology,” he said. “Apply it to journalism, and journalism is about technology. Apply it to education, and education is about technology.”

It is this assimilating nature of technology that Bugeja is most concerned with.

“We can have the professor or the processor, but we cannot have both,” Bugeja said.

The emphasis in the past few decades on technology and not on the actual education process is what worries Bugeja the most, he said. Since students have been able to instantly find answers to questions, they have lost critical-thinking skills necessary to be responsible and informed citizens, he said.

“This country was not founded on technology; it was founded on ideas,” Bugeja said. “What concerns me is that the very industries that are privileged enough to make enormous fortunes in this country do not feel they have a duty to the people of this country.”

As people become more and more distracted by technology and the media it employs, they start to accept things that would otherwise outrage them, Bugeja said.

“Journalists defend the Constitution by informing the public so that it can make intelligent decisions in the voting booth. At issue tonight is whether a focus on profit has undermined that fundamental principle, resulting in a distracted public that often prefers entertainment and celebrity over investigation and accountability,” he said.

An amused society on information overload will hear about abuses of power and respond with passivity and disinterest, Bugeja said.

Jeff Bennett, senior in agricultural engineering, spoke of his disappointment with the math curriculum Iowa State has developed since he received his first degree from Iowa State five years ago.

“I came back and was shocked by all of the classes that have moved online,” Bennett said.

Jane Dawson, senior lecturer of geological and atmospheric sciences, said in her eight years teaching she has not seen the behavior of students change – just the way they engaged in that behavior.

“Before laptops, students were reading papers in class, in probably the same numbers as those using laptops now,” Dawson said.

Dawson teaches a large geology lecture of 250 students, and said students’ behavior just manifests itself differently now.

“Sometimes I wish I could take a snapshot of what they’re doing with class time and send it to their mothers,” Dawson said.

Dawson’s struggle with student attentiveness illustrates Bugeja’s concern with technology’s impact on the education students are receiving.

“Reading helped create public education under the theory that free speech without education was as meaningless as education without free speech,” Bugeja said.

Bugeja said this is not an “age of information.”

“This is an age of distraction,” he said. “Just how distracted are we? Ringtones have become a $4 billion a year business.”