“Peter More, editor of the human resources newsletter Inferential Focus says, ‘Linear thought processes that dominate educational systems today now can actually retard learning for brains developed by playing electronic games and the Internet.’ … He suggests that their brains are physiologically different as a result of the stimuli provided by electronic media…’They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.” (74, Philip)

The influence of technology in the social context of adolescent cognitive development has caused a shift away from deep attention toward hyper attention. Deep attention is defined by cognitive activities focused on one stimulus for extended periods of time (for example reading). Hyper attention is defined by activities with multiple sensory inputs for increasingly shorter periods of time (for example video games). This shift has profound implications for how adolescents experience the world. By extension, it has profound implications for teachers, particularly of English.
Neurological research has concluded that the capacity of working memory is split when multi-tasking. Thus paying attention multiple stimuli leads to a shallower or less focused type of cognition. However, we must not conceive of this as a derivative or lesser form of cognitive functioning. Rather, the definition of cognitive functionality has shifted based on the contextual demands of a highly technological, multimodal society.
We must be responsive to the social contexts of our students. If we can conceive of hyper-attention as a form of cognition objectively equal to that of deep attention, we must then accommodate for this type of cognition in our pedagogical approach. The dominant attitude toward teaching English privileges individuals predisposed to deep attention. In order to teach in response to the cognitive and social context of our students this attitude must expand to include approaches to literacies that incorporate multiple, intersecting modalities. This shift in pedagogical approach does not necessitate the disposal of deep attention activities in reading; it requires us to acknowledge that this approach may pose an issue of cognitive mismatch to many of our students and that hyper-attentive reading activities can be used to scaffold these students as they engage with a traditionally deep-attention oriented subject and discover a style of cognitive focus that adolescents are growing less and less accustomed to.