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16 SMU Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 409 (2013)
Their Brains on Google: How Digital Technologies Are Altering the Millennial Generation's Brain and Impacting Legal Education

handle is hein.journals/comlrtj16 and id is 423 raw text is: Their Brains on Google: How Digital Technologies are Altering the Millennial Generation's Brain and Impacting Legal Education Kari Mercer Dalton* I. INTRODUCTION I sat at a table at Barnes & Noble and tried to focus on the stack of research in front of me. My eyes scanned the first line of the article, but my mind wandered to my smartphone sitting next to the stack of articles. Its pull was irresistible. Did I get a new work email? Better check. Did someone post something new on Facebook? Better check. What about my personal email account? Surely, I needed to check. I might be missing something if I did not check. After a few clicks, I felt bloated by all the unnecessary information: there was a new CLE class on advocacy; my friend Barb was in Paris, stand- ing in front of the Eiffel Tower at that moment; and Gap was having a 25%- off summer sale. I shook off my new knowledge and refocused on my research. I re-read the first line of the article and continued reading for a few minutes. I made it about halfway down the page when my phone dinged, signaling a new text. Better check. When I went back to my research, I just kept thinking about the pull I felt when technology called. I wondered what this was doing to my ability to read and think deeply. Was I becoming a scatterbrain? Could I only read in short spurts? Could I effectively recall what I was reading and draw meaning from the text? I mentioned this to several peers only to find they were also guilty of this distracted way of reading. Whether it was checking their emails or reading online and bouncing from hyperlink to hyperlink, all recounted similar experiences when it came to their new reading and thinking habits. We all concluded that reading and absorbing a longer article was becoming increasingly more difficult. If this was happening to me-a Digital Immigrant, in scholarly terms and a book nerd according to my brother-and my fellow Digital Immi- grant law professors, what was happening to my Digital Native2 students, * Associate Professor at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School. Special thanks are given to Elizabeth Blair Weatherly for her assistance. 1. Beatriz Rivera & Maribel Huertas, Millennials: Challenges and Implications to Higher Education, NYU FAc. RES. NETWORK, (Nov. 17-18, 2006), http:// www.nyu.edu/frn/publications/millennial.student/Challenges%20and%201m- plications.html (The Digital Immigrants are all of us who were born when the computer was not yet personal, the cell phone did not exist, and the best infor- mation highway was a well-equipped library.). 2. Id. Digital Natives are so called because they are native speakers of technol- ogy, fluent in the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. Id.