This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a long piece (behind a firewall) on the work of University of Washington professor David Levy. Levy wrote a very smart book in the early 2000s called Scrolling Forward (I reviewed it for the Los Angeles Times), and for the last several years has been thinking about how the pursuit of ever-faster information technologies and decision-making drive away “slower, ‘endangered’ practices, such as time to think and reflect, time to listen, and time to cultivate our humanity.”

The Chronicle article talks about how students in his class “scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.” All good. More broadly, though, Levy

sees these techniques as the template for a grass-roots movement that could spur similar investigations on other campuses and beyond. Mr. Levy hopes to open a fresh window on the polarized cultural debate about Internet distraction and information abundance.

At its extreme, that debate plays out in the writing of authors whom the critic Adam Gopnik has dubbed the Never-Betters and the Better-Nevers. Those camps duke it out over whether the Internet will unleash vast reservoirs of human potential (Clay Shirky) or destroy our capacity for concentration and contemplation (Nicholas Carr)….

Mr. Levy… sees a problem with many discussions about what technology is doing to our minds.

“So many of those debates fail to even acknowledge or realize that we can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be more attentive,” he says. “What’s crucial is education.”

I think we may be seeing a definitive turn in the public conversation about how information technologies are affecting us. When I was writing the book, I wrote a section on “digital Panglosses and digital Cassandras” that I eventually cut out. The book was already long enough, and I wasn’t that interested in explicitly locating my own work in this debate; instead, I wanted to chart a way out of it, and reframe the questions in ways that let them be answered.

At the base of this enterprise is a sense that we need to recover the belief that connection is inevitable, but distraction is a choice: that despite claims of technological determinism, we have the ability to design and redesign our relationships with information technologies, and make choices about how they affect us.

Clearly, opening up this space of possibility is important for Levy and his students. And I think it’s going to be the place to be in the coming years.