The new social media holds many promises: it allows us to follow the latest
news and to be informed on what our friends are doing and planning.
However, it also makes us feel that we have to be always connected and forced
to interrupt work and study to check our text messages, a Facebook feed, or a
post. By dividing our attention on more than one media, we may believe we
are multitasking and are processing multiple sources of information simultaneously,
without significant cognitive costs. We are not always aware of the
cost of task-switching and, even when we do, we are unable to disconnect. In
this chapter we are going to describe the results of a data collection on the
use of social media in academic contexts. The investigation was conducted
with university students who were asked, through interviews and questionnaires,
whether and how the connection with Facebook and instant messaging interfered with the execution of their primary tasks (listen to the lesson, study)
and what they do to reduce this interference: to prevent it and to recover
focus and concentration. As we will see, the problem is perceived by many
researchers as well as by students, and is related above all to listening in class
and, to a lesser degree, to studying.
