>> in 2007, frontline broadcast a film called "growing up online." >> we need to have the internet on to talk to your friends, because everybody uses it. >> you can be more crazy online because there's no one watching to see what you're actually doing. >> i had no idea what she was doing on the internet. that was a big surprise. >> but today, it's not just our kids. all of us are immersed in technology, all the time... >> this is a digital moment in my life. >> ...from multitasking... >> multitasking could be, essentially, dumbing down the

world. >> ...to the military... >> it is a complete cultural change for the air force. >> ...in work... >> i mean, you've all met in real life at one point, right? >> actually, no. >> ...and at play... >> the first hour, i was hooked. i would play literally non-stop. >> ...and on the virtual frontier. >> the question is, are we entering a new paradigm, or is this just the next best thing? >> that's okay, they're not in the real world. >> i think that you will live in the virtual world a significant percentage of the time >> tonight, frontline producer rachel dretzin and correspondent douglas rushkoff look at the wired world we're living in, our new digital nation. >> i kind of want to push the "pause" button-- pop-- and everything stops, and we can look and say, "just what's going on here?" >> major funding for "digital nation," brought to you by the verizon foundation. empowering educators, parents and students with innovative tools and resources to navigate in a broadband world. to learn more, visit verizonfoundation.org.

>> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and by the corporation for public broadcasting. major funding is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. and by reva and david logan. committed to investigative journalism as the guardian of the public interest. additional funding is provided by the park foundation. dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. >> dretzin: so, it really hit me one night not that long ago.

i was in the kitchen and i was cooking dinner, chopping vegetables. and my husband was in the next room on his laptop, and across the table from my husband was my oldest son, who was also on a laptop, doing his homework. wash your hands. did you wash your hands? and my younger kids had picked up my iphone and were playing a game on it or something. and i don't know, it just hit me-- we're all in the same house, but we're also in other worlds. and i don't know, it just kind of snuck up on us. i didn't see it coming. >> these young teenagers on the phones and on the computers, it's amazing. like, when i was growing up, it wasn't like that. >> i just remember, when i went on my honeymoon 25 years ago, we were away for two weeks, and we didn't know anything that happened in the two weeks that we were gone, because we were on vacation. and that simply doesn't happen anymore.

>> we now have these tools to reach so many people, and all of a sudden, we look around and say, "whoa, you know. now what? " >> well over half my life exists in the digital world. >> i'm connected to my blackberry, i need it at all times. i can't even imagine...i can't even imagine not having it. >> i use my phone. i go on myspace, twitter, facebook, everything. ( laughs ) >> that's my digital life. >> rushkoff: i mean, it's like returning to the scene of the crime. this is the first place... this is where it all began. this is the first college... >> dretzin: when i started this project, looking at life in the digital age, the first person i turned to was my friend douglas rushkoff, whom i've worked with on two previous films. doug's been writing about the internet for close to two decades. >> rushkoff: well, geeks are normal now. >> dretzin: it's true. we decided to start here, on the campus of the massachusetts institute of technology in cambridge. >> rushkoff: if anyone is a new species of digital native, it would be the mit student.

>> dretzin: these kids are among the smartest, most wired people on the planet right now. they may hardly remember a time when they weren't able to be online anywhere they went. >> i have three tests this week. >> dretzin: everywhere you go on this campus, kids are looking at screens, sometimes multiple screens. >> i was productive on saturday. i went out friday. >> dretzin: take eliza. she's 20, a mechanical engineering major, and completely wired, all the time. >> is it going to stay in beta for as long as gmail stayed in beta? >> probably. >> a decade. >> probably. >> i have a few friends who, if they hear the word blackberry, they think of me. like, i am never off of it. it is glued to me. when it's more than arm's length from me, i start to get panicky. it's very disconcerting. are we gchat buddies? can i just... i'm always im-ing or texting or things like that. always checking my phone, taking care of other things while i'm doing something else. >> you are talking to your friend at the same time you're talking to another friend. at the same time, you're emailing another friend about what you're going to do tomorrow night. classes here aren't fun, man. we kind of understand that, too,

between each other. we're all so busy that it's okay, if i'm talking to murph right now and his blackberry goes off and he has to start going on it. i'm like, well, that's okay because i'm going to do that to him anyways, so you just... it's a mutual understanding. school, i think, is kind of the same. like, you're paying attention in class to the professor, you're emailing another professor, and you're looking up something else. >> nobody who's been teaching for 25 years would say that our students aren't different now than they were then. i mean, they need... they need to be stimulated in ways they didn't need to be stimulated before. >> dretzin: sherry turkle has been teaching at mit for more than 30 years. >> every professor who looks out onto a sea of students these days knows there's email, facebook, googling me, googling them, googling their next-door neighbor, that's happening in the classroom. >> dretzin: like most universities, mit allows laptops in its classes at the professor's discretion. >> i mean, it even changes how teachers teach.

because now, the... the pressure is on teaching kind of scintillating powerpoint things that will distract them from the web. >> so, you've hit on most of the key points. i just gave my class a midterm, and i was really asking obvious questions that, had they been attending carefully in lecture, and had they been doing the readings carefully, everyone should have gotten 100% on this exam, and the mean score was probably about a 75%. it's not that the students are dumb. it's not that they're not trying. i think they're trying in a way that's not as effective as it could be because they're distracted by everything else. >> i have 25 in the last 15 minutes. i feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well and that we do at all times. and so, if they try and restrict us from doing it, it's almost unfair because we are completely capable, moving in between lecture and other things, and just keeping track of the many things that are going on in our lives. >> dretzin: no one's actually measured whether these kids are as successful at multitasking as they claim to be.

but out in california, a respected research lab is studying their counterparts on the stanford campus in palo alto. >> you know, they understand the research. they're smart kids. but they seem utterly convinced it doesn't apply to them. we wanted to study what's really going on in the brain, but when it comes to what parts of the brain, we know nothing. these are really the first studies of brain imaging of multitaskers versus non-multitaskers, so anything we discover here is new, because we know zero. now, in this lab here, we're researching speaking on the cell phone while driving. >> tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult person. >> you walk around the world and you see people multitasking. they're playing games and they're reading email and they're on facebook, et cetera. yet classic psychology says that's impossible, no one can do that. in general, our brains can't do two things at once. and we want to ask the question, how do they do it? do they have some secret

ingredient, some special ability that psychologists had no idea about, or what's going on? you guys were chosen because you're very high chronic multitaskers. >> dretzin: nass allowed us to film one of his studies, conducted on a group of carefully chosen students. >> on a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once. these are kids who are doing five, six or more things at once, all the time. >> dretzin: the experiment looks simple-- identify numbers as odd or even, letters as vowels or consonants. but it's rife with traps in the form of distractions. nass is testing how quickly these kids can switch between tasks without losing their focus. >> i'm pretty much constantly texting, and whenever i study, i have my laptop out... >> dretzin: brian is a junior. >> i'm watching a youtube video, i'm checking my email, non-stop refreshing the page, you know, on facebook, facebook chat... >> dretzin: he's pretty confident that his multitasking

is successful. >> ...so that i can always stay connected. >> dretzin: so you think you're effective? >> i think so. >> dretzin: but his results, like others nass has tested, suggested otherwise. >> and what we found was that you're actually significantly slower when you're switching than when you're doing kind of the same task consistently. >> virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking, and one of the big discoveries is, "you know what? you're really lousy at it." it turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. they get distracted constantly. their memory is very disorganized. recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytic reasoning. we worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly. >> dretzin: when i got back to new york, i noticed how much i, too, fell prey to distractions. i kept catching myself in the act-- checking my email when i should have been writing a script, googling something to

satisfy a random curiosity. this is affecting all of us. >> the shakespeare quote is, "we are consumed by that which we are nourished by." speaking for myself, if all i do is my email and my calendar and my searches and my... i feel great. i feel like a master of the universe, getting my calendar and my meetings and my... i just feel great. and then, it's the end of the day-- i've been busy all day and i haven't thought about anything hard. i mean, the point is... the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to distract ourselves to death. >> dretzin: i feel like something's out of whack for me. >> rushkoff: well, it's not just you, it's everybody. >> dretzin: i told doug about the multitasking test i'd seen at stanford, and what i'd been feeling myself. as one of the first media

theorists to follow the net, he's been watching this develop for a long time. >> doug rushkoff joins us this morning in new york. hello, doug. >> rushkoff: hi. good to be here. in the net's early days, it was easy for me to reassure people about bringing technology into their lives. >> are folks getting a little afraid of the technology, since it's going so quickly? are we going to be left in the dust, or can we keep up? >> rushkoff: well, i think people get scared as things develop, especially... back then, i was convinced the web could help us change in profoundly good ways, allowing us to evolve into better people. >> well, i'd like to introduce you, ms. tollman, to the new human being. ( laughter ) here he is. >> rushkoff: well, it's definitely... it's a new human being that's evolved, i think, to the next level, and i think it's... i think it's fascinating and wonderful to watch. i felt like i was in on a secret, that these old fuddy duddys were just panicking, underestimating our kids' ability to adapt to the new reality before us. over the past 20 years, however,

the net has changed from a thing one does to a way one lives-- connected all the time. and there's times i wonder if we may be tinkering with something more essential than we realize. i mean, look at these kids. according to the latest data, most of them are spending more than 50 hours a week with digital media. that's more than a full work week. could this be affecting their brains over time? >> you have young people whose brains are not fully developed. so how a young person chooses to spend their time will have a profound effect on what their brain will be like for the rest of their lives. >> rushkoff: so far, there's only one neuroscientist who's actually examined the impact of the internet on our brains-- dr. gary small at ucla. he took mri scans of people's brain activity reading a book, and then another doing an internet search.

>> this summarizes what we found in that brain-on-google study. so here's your brain reading a book, here's your brain on google. more than two-fold increase in the extent of activity. notice how much activity there is in the front part of the brain, the decision-making part of the brain, which makes sense, because we know we're making lots of decisions when we're searching online. >> rushkoff: you'd think more brain activity-- all that red-- means google is making us smarter. and, in fact, that's what most of the headlines said when small's research was first released. but could it be that simple? where's the other picture, the reading one? i feel like this does not do reading justice. >> well, you know, on a brain scan, big is not necessarily better. you know, if you go to the gym and you start lifting weights, at first, you're going to have to use a lot of energy. but if you train, you're going to become much better. it's a little bit like playing golf-- you want your score to go down. >> rushkoff: so wait a second--

all that media hype, and the doctor himself isn't so sure about their conclusions? small's study wasn't a confirmation of the internet's beneficial effects; if anything, it was a call for some real research, now. so why isn't anyone looking at the real effects of near constant net use? >> by the time you design a research study, apply for funding, implement the study, and you publish the results about the technology, what has happened? the technology is obsolete. we've moved beyond it. and so, the technology and the practices that go with the new technologies, they keep outdistancing the research. the research can't catch up with it. >> we're immersed in it, and it's changing so rapidly, we're just beginning to grasp what's happening. so what will happen with these digital natives, who have grown up with this technology, who are great and efficient in using it, what will they be like in 20, 30 years? will they have fewer empathy skills? will they have trouble putting

together the big picture? those are some of the concerns i have. >> why if you have two...? >> yep, yep. yep. >> dretzin: at home in brooklyn, i have three digital natives of my own. watching my kids with the the computer is my younger children's favorite toy, and my oldest son uses it for school. >> salut. >> salut. >> comment allez-vous? >> comment allez-vous? >> dretzin: although we wonder about the long-term effects of all this technology, it's also becoming clear to us that our kids' education needs to have different priorities than ours did. >> kids are going to need to be fluent in technology, they're going to need to be excellent at communication, they're going to need to be problem solvers. that's just the way the world is now. two lines, two lines. >> dretzin: jason levy is the principal of a middle school in new york's south bronx.

>> to me, there should never be a question as to whether or not students should have access to technology. technology is like oxygen, you know, and no one would ever have an argument that we should take away they oxygen from the kids. >> dretzin: four years ago, the school was on the verge of collapse. >> kids were not being challenged. there were a lot of fights and arguments. a lot of gang activity. >> dretzin: only 9% of the students were meeting state standards in math. >> walking through the hallways, it felt like, at any moment, chaos was going to break out. it felt like, every day, we were holding on with everything we could just to get through the day. how you guys doing? >> dretzin: levy took over the school in 2004, after a string of other principals had been unable to turn it around. >> let's go. >> dretzin: he had an ambitious idea. >> jason said, "my vision is to have all the students, with laptops, do their homework online. i said, "jason, i've been doing this 25 years. you think this is possible?

i think you're crazy." he said, "no, this is going to happen. this is going to work here, gina. watch." >> thank you very much. that was a good job. >> please log in. the computer has been amazing. it's an email i sent called "monday ning project tasks". ning is a social networking site where you can make your own separate little network. and so i created ning social networks for my students as characters for "to kill a mockingbird." if you are atticus, you're creating the discussion question... and they can write discussion questions, they can comment on each others' walls, they upload pictures, they write diary entries, they add music. they're finding jazz songs that i gave them, billie holiday songs, that go with the time period. yeah, that's fine. and its amazing these kids are getting so into it. because i was really worried that they wouldn't grasp the novel. >> incidents of violence are way down. we track those things and they've been decimated. daily attendance is up over 90%.

in test scores, we went up in reading, 30%, and in math, almost 40%. you know, i wake up every day and i go to bed every night knowing that we're doing something right. >> dretzin: something is working here, undoubtedly. it feels like the kids' minds are being opened in a new way. >> can you hold on? >> dretzin: but at the same time, the school is often battling the lures of online distractions. >> it's what i call instant gratification education. a thought comes to you, you pursue it. you see a web site, you click on it. you want to hear music while you're studying, you do it. all this bifurcates the brain, keeps it from being able to pursue one linear thought, and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs. >> dretzin: the school's firewall blocks access to sites like youtube and myspace, but the kids figure out how to get to them anyway. >> sometimes, the teachers bore us, and instead of listening to them, we go on the web sites.

>> if a teacher comes or something, they'll switch it so the teacher won't see, you know. it's mostly myspace, aim, and games. but at the same time, doing our schoolwork. >> so i click, and there's an "observe" button. and it brings up their screen. >> dretzin: the school's assistant principal spends part of each day remotely monitoring what the kids are doing on their laptops. >> oh, we have a photo booth. >> dretzin: he can see them, but they can't see him. >> these kids are goofing off, taking pictures of themselves in class. >> dretzin: so, wait, do all the kids have the cameras on? >> sixth and seventh grade have the cameras. a lot of kids are just on it to check their hair, do their makeup. they just use it like it's a mirror. i always like to mess with them and take a picture. >> dretzin: ( laughs ) >> nine times out of ten, they duck out of the way. and then they shut down and they get right back to work. so, i can see he's got a few things going on here. he's got the photo booth program open. he's got his social studies

project open. school email open. you know, i think the kids know what is expected of them, but they also want to do all their other things. that's what i see a lot of is the multitasking. "but i was doing my work, too." >> dretzin: most of the adults at the school actually seemed pretty sanguine about the kids being so easily distracted. >> you learn something new every day. >> i think there's something to be said for multitasking. i think that teaching students to multitask is really important for their future jobs. monday's new project... >> we have to embrace the fact that our kids are going to need different skills five years from now than they needed five years ago. the world has sped up in a lot of ways, and i think education hasn't. >> dretzin: here in the bronx, where most of the kids weren't engaged in school at all before, bringing in technology has clearly been a net gain. but what about the kids at mit, and the multitasking experiments at stanford? at some point, does the increasing use of technology create diminishing returns?

>> i never read books. i'll be honest, i can't remember the last time i read a book. >> dretzin: greg bukata was a senior at a new jersey high school when we interviewed him about his reading habits. >> nowadays, people are so busy that they need to get summaries of it, like sparknotes. you can read the whole book in a matter of pages. so i read all online. i've actually never read, like, "romeo and juliet," so i read it yesterday in five minutes. i mean, if there were 27 hours in a day, i'd read "hamlet," i really would, but it's only 24. >> you will find a lot of english professors saying, "i can't assign a novel more than 200 pages. i used to. i can't anymore." >> dretzin: mark bauerlein, a professor at emory university, wrote a book called the dumbest generation. it's filled with data suggesting that kids aren't as academically capable as they used to be before all these digital distractions. >> what i would like more than anything else is for young people to prove every single

harsh judgment in that book flat wrong, right? we want them to grow up and to blow us away with their... their literacies, their reading and writing skills, their knowledge about... about history and art, and their civic activity. but we just don't see it. >> dretzin: bauerlein quotes a 2007 n.e.a. study that shows that, while younger students' reading skills are improving, as kids get older and, ostensibly, more wired, their reading deteriorates. and he claims that writing skills are suffering, too. >> when the chronicle of higher education surveyed college professors about basic skills today as compared to ten years ago, only 6% of them said that college students come into their classes very well prepared in writing. by a two-to-one margin, they said basic skills are worse today than they were a decade ago. >> you already hear professors and others talking about changes

in the way kids write, so that instead of writing an essay, they write in paragraphs. they write a paragraph, and they say, "oh, now, i'll look at facebook for a while." or they write a paragraph and say, "oh, a chance to play poker" or to do all of these at once. so what we're seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through, and much more little bursts and snippets. >> dretzin: the mit students we met confirmed that constant interruptions do have an effect on their writing. >> there isn't this, kind of, connection between paragraphs. it's like the paragraphs are kind of separate and... >> oh, i get yelled at for that all the time. all the time. ( laughter ) my papers, my first draft, it's always like, "all right, paragraph one-- awesome; two-- awesome; three-- awesome. i don't see the connection." and in my head, "well, i was probably thinking about something else during then" or "i wasn't look at the big picture. it was short term, short term, short term. >> dretzin: but how much does it matter? could it be that the old ways of expressing ourselves are evolving into something else? >> the reason a lot of people

are stuck, i think, is because they confuse the old ways, the best ways of doing something once, with the best ways of doing those things forever. so, it's not that kids shouldn't learn to communicate, it's not that they shouldn't learn to express complex ideas-- of course, they should still learn all those things. but we invent new ways of teaching. and i don't know that the book, which was for a long period of time-- but not that long, maybe a couple of centuries-- the way that people did this-- that was the primary way-- is the best way in the 21st century. >> there's always gains and losses. you know, when, print replaced oral culture, when writing happened, there are certainly things we lost. one of them was memory. think of the homeric poems, the "iliad" and the "odyssey." the homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of

poetry out of their own memory. we're not good at that anymore, because print took it away. is it a loss? sure. and to a certain extent, getting people to be contemplative and a little bit slower, not to multitask all the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time, to a certain extent, might be lost. but that's the price of gain. >> dretzin: do you struggle with the issue of distraction, personally? >> i don't know anyone on the planet who doesn't struggle with the issue of distraction, personally. you get pulled in every direction today. but this is not a new issue. go back and read descriptions of the progressive era, walking down the streets in new york, and the sense of your eyes being pulled in every direction by the hubbub of the crowd. people described it as being, like, electrocuted, you know, bolts of energy shooting through you from every direction.

people as early as the 1960s were telling us we were moving to a reality of information overload. so the point is, this is a problem that we as human beings have coped with throughout most of the 20th century, into the 21st century. and the good news is, we survived it. as a culture, we've learned how to adapt to it. so, what we are seeing is a period of evolution. and at the end of the day we're better off as a society if we go at this with a sense of open-mindedness and exploration. >> i'm on my computer 24/7. it's kind of sad.çj but it's also kind of a good thing that we should embrace technology that we have. and we should be thankful for it.)-úó/÷oç >> i was in the library with my blackberry, i had my laptop... >> dretzin: on frontline's "digital nation" web site, hundreds of people have submitted their own stories about how the net has impacted their lives. >> she said, "you know what? this is really sad. we're supposed to be on vacation

and we're just totally wired." >> dretzin: there are stories of parenting in the digital age... >> my son learned to read through gaming. >> my kids can do four to five functions concurrently and never even break a sweat. >> dretzin: ... of personal transformation... >> i went from a carboholic couch potato to a cyber-crusading warrior princess. >> i deleted her, i deleted her sister. >> dretzin: ... stories of romance... >> i deleted her three best friends. >> dretzin: ... and struggles with privacy. >> i ended up taking it down. but now i sort of feel like i have to censor sometimes what i say with my family, whereas before, like, the minute i felt something before, i'd would just type it out, but now that i know that people are watching me... >> dretzin: so check this one stories was this one. >> let me tell you this. i never knew what blogging was or twitter or any of these fancy names. do you know, i'm becoming an expert? >> dretzin: it turned out that an 83-year-old woman and her

grandson have a hit online cooking show called "feed me, bubbe." >> bubbe, what's today's yiddish word? >> today's word is "bubbe", meaning "grandmother." >> dretzin: bubbe cooks, and her grandson avram does everything else. >> hi. >> well, hello. rachel and doug, welcome to my home. shalom. come in. come into my favorite spot, the kitchen. are you hungry? do you want to eat? it's just tuna fish with a little bit of mayo. and then, roll it up carefully. >> dretzin: thank you. >> thank you, bubbe. >> you know, i worked until i was 73. i worked for a bank. and all of a sudden, this came along, and now i'm too... too busy. >> the internet, really, i have to say, added years to bubbe's life. >> i think, these days, it's important for any age. i mean, it's growing... it's

changing so fast that if you don't keep up with it a little bit, you're really left behind. >> rushkoff: do you sometimes feel bad for kids being raised in an... in an internet era? that they depend so much on the digital for their sense of connection to other people? >> they grew up with it; to them, it's like second nature. and it's easier for my grandchildren to go into email... i get angry sometimes at them, i say, "you know, i'd like to hear your voice. i know you email." they sit down and they'll type out email, and it's wonderful. "but call me on the telephone." >> ready to answer some e-mails? >> yep. >> okay. >> "every time i read your recipes, i think about my mother. i miss her. thank you." there's something missing, that they have to pour their heart out to me. oh, she's writing about the jelly-jammies. their memories, their feelings, their weaknesses. >> what do you want to say to charlotte? >> "please let me know how you

signed, bubbe." it's... i don't know, a little bit of loneliness that there's something there that... that i filled, that bubbe fills the gap, that video fills the gap. "please keep in touch." >> rushkoff: bubbe's fans talk to her through email, but as the technology advances, people are finding ever more sophisticated ways to use it to connect to each other. world of warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game that brings millions of people from around the world into the same virtual universe; in this case, a land of dragons, elves, and orcs called azeroth. >> they shouldn't be linked.

>> rushkoff: alen lives in new york and is a member of a warcraft guild... >> it's probably because i took floating text out. >> rushkoff: ...a group of players that work together to fight off monsters, attack enemy this guild raids, on average, four evenings a week. >> i need to hug my boy good night. i'll be right back.[ >> win rider, orc shaman, windster clan horde. >> rushkoff: many of these people never actually meet each other in person, unless they travel to one of the annual fan conventions sponsored by the gaming companies. >> they told me you'd be here. >> rushkoff: but they say they consider each other close friends. >> we talk four times a week because we meet online, so... we recognize everyone's voices, and we're just getting used to faces now. >> yeah, we have members as far away as new zealand. >> rushkoff: last summer, we followed alen and his wife liza out to california, where every year, blizzard entertainment throws a giant party for its

fans. >> oh, my god. they're all playing the game. >> rushkoff: sure, games like warcraft aren't for everyone, but the number and variety of people here, and how close they claim to feel to each other, was impressive. >> we've all spent hundreds of hours together. my traditional-style friends who i have outside the game, none of them do i spend 16 hours a week with, week in and week out. i mean, i've known some of these folks for years. >> people who do not game and do not have the experience, do not understand friendships, the connections, and how close you can get to someone that you've never seen. >> rushkoff: with all those hours spent in the game, warcraft can get addictive. >> the first hour, i was hooked. i was immediately immersed in this world-- of course, completely made up. but it was so striking, and i could not stop playing, at all.

i would play, literally, non-stop. >> i got so into world of warcraft that i was getting up at about 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, and i'd play straight through the day, and i wouldn't log off until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. i even kind of quit my job, because i really didn't want to do anything other than play world of warcraft. >> rushkoff: warcraft is only one game in a multibillion dollar industry that, for years, has been generating more revenue than the hollywood box office. >> and she's down. >> oh, i've talked with you. oh, you're nicholas? >> i'm nicholas. >> dretzin: how do you guys all know each other? >> met through the game. all online. we had never met before we came down here to las vegas. >> yup. >> this is the most fun i've ever had in my life. >> yes, ever. >> i'm closer to my online friends than anybody in real life. >> yeah, pretty much. >> definitely. >> rushkoff: and virtual worlds aren't just for gamers.

>> hi everybody. i'm very happy all of you managed to join us. we're going to teach you how to move around, how to walk around without bumping into people. >> rushkoff: these ibm employees are getting their first lesson in how to use second life, a 3d immersive environment where ibm has created its own virtual office complex. >> the goal is to basically use this tool on a day-to-day basis, to make it as easy for you to collaborate with people in india and in china... >> rushkoff: the company is in the process of shifting many of its internal meetings into virtual worlds. >> ...and hopefully make it almost as natural. we're just putting the metrics in place, but we estimate that, for all the meetings that we ran last year, we saved more than $1 million just by not flying to meetings. >> so click the "fly" button, and what you'll notice is that you'll hover up in the air, and once you're in that hovering position, that means you're all ready to fly. very good, scott.

anybody else? don't be afraid. >> how do i get down? ( laughter ) >> rushkoff: but as big an incentive as saving money on travel is the idea that virtual worlds might recapture the human connection lost in a culture of videoconferencing and phone calls. >> does that make sense? >> okay. >> yep, sounds good. >> all right, let's... let's head over there. >> this technology will make it possible for me to work from home, but still introduce this notion of being able to meet people, and... and be much more in the old workplace environment where, in fact, you did have a team around you that you would meet face-to-face. and you would have ad-hoc meetings, you know, you'd go, "okay, let's go to this conference room, let's have a cup of coffee." you can almost do that virtually, while a lot of us are working remotely. >> i think that our society today, you know, we're alienated form each other and from the

world around us. when people come together in a virtual world, we immediately become more social and more connected, and more dependent on each other. and i think that when people go into virtual worlds, the sense of being physically near each other causes them to behave much better than they do, say, in email or instant messaging. that's an interesting phenomenon. >> rushkoff: philip rosedale is the founder of second life. he's fashioned his own workplace to reflect the values he thinks virtual worlds promote. >> so, you know, we all sit open without any cubicles or anything here... >> rushkoff: instead of critical performance reviews, second life employees give each other virtual pats on the back through a program rosedale designed called the love machine. >> ...we use it as a performance, like, it's how we track how we're all doing. >> rushkoff: they often hold their meetings around campfires or on sandy beaches in second life, even when they're sitting across the office from each other. >> this is my desk.

there's not a whole lot to our real spaces anymore, you know. all the big stuff is virtual. my office in the virtual world is much cooler than this. it's a big glass room with room for, like, ten people to sit down and talk at the same time. >> rushkoff: there's no phones ringing here. >> yeah, there's really... nobody uses phones anymore. >> rushkoff: is that really why...? what struck me most about rosedale was his confidence that he could solve the alienation modern technology has helped to create with more technology. >> technology, over the last, say, 50 years has mostly separated us. we've gone from watching movies together to watching them in living rooms to watching them on ipods. and i think that the technology is now actually starting to bring us back together again. >> rushkoff: sure, but as people become more comfortable with experiencing their togetherness online, what happens to the places we created to offer us togetherness in the real world?

ibm built this office park in westchester, new york, in the late 1980s as a hub for thousands of employees. but today, the place is like a ghost town. it's as if no one actually works here. they planned this place as an industrial age company where people would actually come to work in their cars and park, go into offices. and now, basically, everybody is either at home or in hotels or god knows where, logging in through their machines. it's not... it's not that ibm let everybody go, right? it's that everybody's just not here. >> yeah, why don't you come over and sit down in the seat so we can see you?

i feel like i'm all alone here. >> rushkoff: could you tell us where you all are? where you're coming into this room from, in real space? >> like, where you all really live, i guess is the question. >> so, hi, this is julie, based out of burlington, vermont. >> hi, this is johan. i'm living and googling in germany. >> hi, this is arthur. i'm from san campinas, a city near sao paolo, in brazil. >> rushkoff: i mean, you've all met in real life one point or another, right? >> actually no, none of us have. >> no. >> no. >> rushkoff: but you're... this is your main team, right? >> yeah, actually we meet here every day, so this is how we know each other. >> rushkoff: as more of our real lives migrate to virtual spaces, there's a growing market for research exploring how we behave inside those spaces, as well as how our virtual experiences change us.

>> we use computer algorithms to do it automatically now. this is a subject who is in the midst of an experiment right now. she's wearing a head-mounted display that shows what you're seeing here. >> rushkoff: jeremy bailenson runs the virtual human interaction lab at stanford. >> she's actually seeing depth in stereo. you can see that candy coming right into her mouth. >> rushkoff: his research shows how the distinctions between real and virtual are becoming blurred, even interchangeable. >> subjects would report afterwards being sick, being full. >> rushkoff: it's a subject of intense interest, right now, to the government, marketers, even the military, all of whom fund his work. >> we're not wired to differentiate experiences like this one from actual eating, meaning digital stuff is such a new phenomenon that if it looks real and it feels real, the brain tells us its real. >> rushkoff: and the identification gets even more profound when our avatars wear our real-life faces. >> rushkoff: in one study, we made you ten centimeters taller than you actually were and had you conduct a negotiation with someone.

having ten centimeters difference in height from your normal self causes you to be three times more likely to beat someone else in a negotiation in virtual reality. >> rushkoff: and bailenson found that advantage persists even after you leave the virtual world. >> regardless of our actual height, you'll then beat me face to face when we have a negotiation. so, this stunned us. a small exposure inside virtual reality carried over to their behavior face-to-face. >> all right, your grandparents are going to leave for a little bit. >> rushkoff: but bailenson's most stunning research involved kids. he calls it the "swimming with whales" experiment. >> okay, well, i heard a little earlier that when you were three years old, two years ago, you swam with two black and white fish named fudgy and buddy. do you remember swimming with the black and white fish, fudgy and buddy? >> no. >> no, you don't remember anything? >> we've done studies with children, when they see themselves swimming around with whales in virtual reality, a week later, half of them will

believe that they've swam with whales. >> rushkoff: kids actually believe that they've done this? >> absolutely. about 50% of them will believe that, in physical space, they actually went to sea world and swam with whales. >> rushkoff: does that freak you out a little bit? >> you know, people always ask me. a lot of the stuff that we do in the lab says that virtual experiences can profoundly affect you in wonderful and not so wonderful ways. these experiences are happening, and the world is rushing like a freight train towards digital stuff. i just see it as where we're going. >> rushkoff: undoubtedly, it is where we are going. and at the leading edge is the u.s. military. currently, they're using computer simulations to treat troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. sergeant gerald della salla did a year's tour in iraq, and is now being treated with virtual reality therapy at the manhattan v.a., one of over 40 centers around the country piloting the program.

>> that kind of pushed my stress level, recently, just with that last one, to six. >> rushkoff: it's still in clinical trials, but early results are encouraging. >> under certain circumstances, their whole posture will change. they're leaning forward and they've got that gun, and you can see something's happening to them emotionally at that point. >> that person on the bridge who's firing, we're firing back at them. and ambush fire came around, and we... we basically continued through it. >> anxiety rating? >> it's a five. >> over time, their brain is able to say, okay, this is uncomfortable, this is unpleasant, but it's not a life-threatening situation. i can tone down the level of anxiety and stress. anxiety rating?

>> it's good. one. >> good work today, jerry. >> dretzin: the military relies on digital technology in nearly every phase of its operations, from recruitment to training to actual fighting. ( gunfire ) >> die! >> dretzin: in 2008, the army replaced five recruiting centers in the philadelphia area with a $12 million digital gaming arcade called the army experience center. they stocked it with pc gaming stations and 3d simulators of humvees and helicopters. >> here in the army experience center, it's not the whole army, it's not completely... you know, video games are never going to replicate the real thing. but it is a sampling experience to pique your interest and maybe encourage you to go learn more. >> dretzin: and at camp pendleton in california, the marines train troops about to deploy using interactive battle simulations, with virtual civilians appearing alongside virtual insurgents.

>> left side! >> right side, clear! >> clear! >> we policed some rooms over there about an hour ago, and i accidentally shot a civilian. i'm glad it just happened on the screen and it didn't really happen in real life. >> dretzin: but it's on the battlefield that the most profound implications of using new technologies are coming into focus. >> other aircraft. air space. altitude. >> all right, it looks like we're by ourselves out here in 63 bravo high... >> dretzin: from air-conditioned rooms on this air force base in the desert outside of las vegas, pilots fly unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, that execute missions in iraq and afghanistan. >> ...might be taking fire at this time. >> dretzin: airmen here are required to wear flight suits to

work, even though they sit 7,500 miles away from the battlefield. >> every so often, you have technologies that come along that rewrite the rules of the game. yet we don't talk about it. because it's costless to us. >> dretzin: drones have the capacity to strike with extraordinary precision, and at no cost to american lives. the number of drones has multiplied in recent years, and the pentagon is clamoring for more. >> the risks are all one-way. in today's wars, right now, the pilot gets to do all the shooting and never gets shot at. and that creates a very

different attitude than somebody who is both dealing out risk and is accepting risk. >> room, ten-hut! >> the biggest risk that we accept is that feeling of detachment from the aircraft. you need to be able to think through a three-dimensional problem that's located 7,500 miles away from you. it's a real live aircraft, real live weapons, doing a real mission. i try to ensure that people understand there are people who are counting on us to do the mission. you can fly in afghanistan one day, and the very next day, you're flying in iraq. though they're physically located here, they need to think in their mind that they are in theater, because that's where the business end of that cockpit is. you're no longer sitting at creech air force base. get in that mindset. when you step into the gcs, you are... >> like to confirm deadly, we

have a single individual on the roof, on the north corner of that four-sided building. >> dretzin: the planes' cameras can surveil their targets from up to nine miles overhead. >> and looks like they may be employing weapons at this time. one time, we had intel that there was a bad guy riding around on a motorcycle, if you will. and he was just riding around, and he stopped at two or three different playgrounds, and he's playing soccer with all these kids, you know. and he's just... he's living his life, he's doing his normal, everyday life. and then, you know, sure enough, at the end of that ride, though, we found him at a meeting of bad people. and it ended up resulting in a strike. so you end up seeing what happens. copy that we got eyes on him. 3-0-5 rifle. time of flight-- 15 seconds. that's ten seconds. five, four, three, two, one. and splash.

>> they do take a lot of care about civilian casualties. it is very much on their mind. but there's no way for them to really tell. all they see is the bomb going into that building, and it blowing up. they don't necessarily see what happens afterwards. a drone can't dig through the rubble and see what the consequences of that hellfire missile was. it can't. >> dretzin: estimates vary as to the number of civilians killed in air strikes in afghanistan. and the u.s. and nato forces don't publicly differentiate between manned and unmanned strikes in tracking civilian casualties. we asked one of the pilots about it. >> um, yeah, i mean, everybody worries about things, uh... all's you can do is... is you can make sure that you're prepared. >> dretzin: so, you don't think you've ever hit someone you haven't intended to hit? >> uh, no. i've... i... no.

>> going to war has meant the same thing for over 5,000 years. going to war meant that you were going to a place where there was such danger that you might never come home again, you might never see your family again. now, compare that experience to that of a predator drone pilot. you're sitting behind a computer screen, you're shooting missiles at enemy targets, you're killing enemy combatants. and then at the end of the day, you get back in your car, and 20 minutes later, you're at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework. >> hey, guys! >> daddy! >> hi. >> you know, your family is not going to totally understand. you can't explain everything to them. that's a challenge in the job, that you've got to do that day in and day out. >> i went to recess.

>> this disconnect of being at war and at home is very tough for the human mind to wrap itself around. and we're finding that some of these drone pilots actually have combat stress, and ptsd, even, just like the units physically deployed into iraq and afghanistan. >> dretzin: there is no question that, as time goes by, more and more of our real experiences are shifting into the virtual realm. the pace can sometimes feel dizzying. >> this is a mirror. >> oh, it's cool. >> you know, there were people who complained when we moved from horses to cars, there were people who complained when we moved from letters to the telephone. and its not that they're wrong, totally, because things get lost. so, you might have less memory, we don't have as flowery writing. but we gain other things, and

life moves on. >> dretzin: that it will change us is not in doubt, but how we will change may still be up to us. >> technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that, first of all, we have to figure out what they are. that's not so easy. technology isn't good or bad. it's powerful and it's complicated. take advantage of what it can do. learn what it can do. but also ask what is it doing to us? we're going to slowly, slowly find our balance, but i think its going to take time.

>> next time on frontline... these women have been torn from their lives, taken from their families, and sold into slavery. frontline goes undercover to tell the tragic story of the sex trade. >> this report continues on frontline's web site. >> i love the internet! >> watch more of the personal stories from hundreds of contributors... >> i can't remember a line. great, i just go online and there it is. >> there was a massive power outage. we actually talked to each other. >> dive into a year's worth of reporting on digital life; read extended interviews... >> the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to... >> ...watch the program online, and join the discussion at pbs.org. >> major funding for "digital nation," brought to you by the verizon foundation. empowering educators, parents and students with innovative tools and resources to navigate

in a broadband world. to learn more, visit verizonfoundation.org. >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and by the corporation for public broadcasting. major funding is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. and by reva and david logan. committed to investigative journalism as the guardian of the public interest. additional funding is provided by the park foundation. dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. captioned by media access group at wgbh

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