Employers expect responses to email at night and on weekends – as do students – and most of us feel pressured to oblige. This expectation causes a feedback loop. And as people become accustomed to getting immediate answers, they do less digging for information themselves. I can’t count how often my students email me to ask when my office hours are. I write back the same way every time: ‘Check the first page of the syllabus.’ They email me without checking to see if the syllabus has the answer because they can, because I’m supposed to be accessible and answer their questions. This is one of the main reasons I won’t get a smartphone.

Employers expect responses to email at night and on weekends – as do students – and most of us feel pressured to oblige. This expectation causes a feedback loop. And as people become accustomed to getting immediate answers, they do less digging for information themselves. I can’t count how often my students email me to ask when my office hours are. I write back the same way every time: ‘Check the first page of the syllabus.’ They email me without checking to see if the syllabus has the answer because they can, because I’m supposed to be accessible and answer their questions. This is one of the main reasons I won’t get a smartphone.

Two minutes in, students’ focus started to wane as they checked messages, texts and various websites. The average student lasted six minutes before caving to the temptation to engage in social media. Despite being watched, students spent only approximately 65 per cent of the allotted time studying.

While the term ‘cyborg’ conjures up science-fiction characters such as RoboCop and Iron Man, Case argues that devices don’t need to be implanted into our bodies for us to be connected to and unable to function without them.

For the record, I use technology in the classroom every day – specifically, an LCD projector hooked up to my laptop to facilitate discussion and the evaluation of writing. My students submit their papers via an online site; I comment on them using Microsoft Word and then upload the comments. While I miss taking hard copies to the park to grade, this approach is eco-friendly, nothing gets lost, there are no disputes about whether or when something was turned in, and I can copy and paste examples from these submissions to use in class. There are clear benefits to using technology and social media as tools, and I try to teach my students how to use them appropriately. They’re all required to create Twitter accounts and to follow publications, researchers, scholars, organisations and university departments in the field they’re researching. We tweet thesis statements and research questions to one another to force brevity and clarity. I teach them how to use Wikipedia for preliminary research, key terms, debated topics and a head start on sources. We investigate sub-Reddits and look for Facebook groups related to our topics. It doesn’t make sense to ignore or banish them from using these sites – they’re going to use them anyway, so they might as well learn how to do it responsibly and productively.

Measuring subjects’ brain waves, researchers at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland found significant differences between people who use smartphones and people who don’t. Because we text with our thumbs and swipe with our index fingers, smartphone users’ brains register more activity in the parts of the brain that correspond to these digits; these areas of the brain are also bigger. A University of Sussex study found that people who multitask across multiple devices have decreased grey-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the region of the brain that controls emotional and cognitive functioning.

Would I have trudged to my professor’s office to enquire when she held office hours?

Though I’m grateful on a daily basis that Facebook and cellphones weren’t around when I was in college, this isn’t a new problem.

A California State University study monitored middle-, high-school and college students who had been instructed to research something important for 15 minutes. Two minutes in, students’ focus started to wane as they checked messages, texts and various websites. The average student lasted six minutes before caving to the temptation to engage in social media. Despite being watched, students spent only approximately 65 per cent of the allotted time studying

I used to jump to the conclusion that students with whom I had such interactions were inherently flawed, academic lost causes. But that’s a reductive explanation, and doesn’t get at the heart of the problem; it’s not just that they have trouble paying attention or are distracted by their phones or laptops in the classroom. The problem is their use of technology in general. Technology demands a significant amount of time and attention and has conditioned them to not question it. It takes up more and more of their bandwidth, and the net effect is lobotomising.

A study from Princeton University shows that we process information better when taking notes by hand because writing is slower than typing (an argument often spun in favour of laptops), which helps students learn and retain the material. Similarly, people better comprehend what they’re reading if it’s on paper rather than on the screen.

In the minutes before class – the ones I used to spend shooting the breeze with students about TV shows, sports or what they did over the weekend – we now sit in technologically-induced silence. Students rarely even talk to each other anymore. Gone are the days when they gabbed about the impossible chemistry midterm they just took or the quality of the food at the dining halls.

to sing a song or bust some dance moves in front of the class.