The campus can be a noisy place ? and most students seem to like it that way.

After five years in a classroom-only teaching assignment, I came back this fall to a lab environment (the State Hornet) in which 30 or 40 people work daily on a variety of information-related projects. Most days, the din in the newsroom mimics a loud cocktail party, complete with music, shouted comments and, of course, some miscommunication. For faculty, this cacophony is anathema to concentration and work. But to many students it appears it may be a bottom-line requirement. Silence might be as distracting as the noise is to me.

This revelation (if I dare call it that) came as I was reading “Culture Jam, The Uncooling of America,” while sealed off in my quiet faculty office, the bass of a stereo moving the walls. In “Culture Jam,” author Kalle Lasn dissects modern corporate culture and education and offers that today’s college students have been raised and educated in such a hyper-mediated environment that they require a level of stimulation that would fry the brains of most faculty (at least those which haven’t already been fried).

Thus, those students sitting in the library ? studying with an MP3 player blaring with their headphones clamped on ? are actually creating their own version of white noise to block out other distractions. The problem, Lasn notes however, is that this same phenomenon may be responsible for increasingly short attention spans.

And that’s probably enough of that, so let’s move to another topic.

(Just kidding.)

The short attention span issue is a real one and where it came from is less relevant than its effect on students’ ability to learn. Once students went to the library and spent hours in the stacks, thumbing books and periodicals for information. Today most find a fast Internet connection, harness their favorite search engine and consider that research. Check the reams of paper coming out of the printers in the labs, if you have any doubts.

So what’s the matter with that? Maybe a lot.

A visit to the library, to the bookshelves or the journals provides the opportunity for discovery beyond the narrow confines of what www.hotbot.com, or Yahoo! have to offer on any subject. But our busy students, many of whom are computer-bound, sometimes have trouble appreciating the value of serendipity ? if it requires movement outside of their normal patterns. It’s quite doubtful “Culture Jam” would have come my way via an Internet excursion. (I found it on the browsing shelf, along with an excellent biography of Norman Mailer and a history of cowboys in the American west.) Yet reading it is helping me understand a problem that really had me stumped.

I still have trouble with the racket in the workplace, but I can sympathize more than I could.

But just wait until I bring in my Beach Boys albums.

Michael J. Fitzgerald is a professor of Journalism and a member of the CSUS Faculty Senate. He can be reached by telephone at 278-7896, by mail C/O the State Hornet? CSUS, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA, 95819 or by e-mail at [email protected].