Monona,

I would like to respectfully recommend avoiding generalizations about "this future generation" and "attention deficit." As someone who is both a member of the younger generation and has been diagnosed with ADHD since the age of 6, I believe that many tend to fall into misconceptions about both groups. Attention deficit disorders are much more than being unable to sit still or having trouble paying attention to a lecture. For example, the aspect of ADHD that affects me most in my adult life is the effect it has on executive function (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856709620402). This effect is the difference between procrastinating because you don't want to do something, which many people experience, and being unable to start an activity that you look forward to (like reading a book or even watching TV) because for whatever reason you just can't quite get yourself to start no matter how much you want to dive in. For others it can be a hyper-reaction to any sort of rejection or criticism (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054706288106). It's a much more nuanced disorder than popular media has led many, including myself, to believe; many of these aspects are things I've only learned about in the last year or two, despite being diagnosed for over 75% of my life.

As for how younger generations consume information and their media habits, I would put forward that this may just be another evolution of how people consume information. Within the last 150 years we have gone from only having print media and oral communication, to having radio, to having television, to having the Internet. Having the Internet in a portable device is really less than 15 years old. Our ability to transfer knowledge has adapted with each new invention so far. I don't disagree that in-person training provides opportunities that pre-recorded videos do not, or that written word affords a degree of refinement that is otherwise difficult to achieve. But new modes of communication also offer new advantages. An in-person presentation is a fixed point in time; if someone misses it, that's it, they miss it until it's offered again (if it's offered again). But with recordings they can still see something, and I believe that some level of learning is better than none at all. Video allows visual demonstration of complex tasks that are difficult to describe in writing. From experience, I can say that it is much easier to understand how to use a Schlenk line from a visual demonstration of it than from trying to read even a very well-written 20 page guide. And all this assumes that current generations prefer digital to hands-on. Obviously my own experience is only anecdotal, but I can say that when I give hands-on trainings, I have a much easier time getting undergraduates to engage with me and my material than I do postdocs!

This ended up being longer than I intended, so all this is to say that I think writing off a generation as a lost cause might be premature, and while there may be challenges, there are at least as many new opportunities.

Sincerely,

Jack Reidy (he/him)

Research Safety Specialist

Environmental Health & Safety

Stanford University

484 Oak Road, Stanford, CA, 94305

Tel: (650) 497-7614