By Ryan Zukerman

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Boredom fills the life of junior James Harlan. “I’m usually bored two to three times per day,” he said. “Whenever I don’t have anything to do, I’m bored.” To entertain himself, Harlan said he turns to, among other things, his cell phone. “I just play the games on it and text,” he said.

Augustin de la Peña, a psychophysiologist and sleep specialist who has focused on boredom and its effects for most of his career, defined the term “boredom” as a variably conscious, generally unpleasant drive state that obtains in response to a “significant undershoot” of an organism’s optimal rate of information flow for the experience of “interest.”

Harlan is not alone. In a survey from the Pew Research Center from April 2010, 69 percent of teen cell phone owners , particularly girls, say that they use their phones as a source of entertainment. About 77 percent of girls say cell phones are good boredom beaters compared to 61 percent of boys.

As for sophomore Cameron “Cami” Trachtman, she only uses her cell phone in her free time. “Sometimes I use my cell phone for entertainment just by texting because I don’t have Internet on my phone,” she said. “If I’m bored I tend to talk to people more, so I guess that when I’m bored I tend to be more connected.”

According to de la Peña, connectivity and boredom are closely related. “Boredom and its associated states of loneliness, alienation, and personal emptiness can be mitigated by increasing degrees of connectivity to the world,” he said. “A large number of teenagers spend a large percentage of their waking hours playing video games, on the Internet, on their cell phones, texting, tweeting, and engaging in other activities that offer a sense of connection with the world. The need to mitigate the experience of boredom and loneliness is currently so severe for many teens that multitasking with the latest electronic technology while engaged in activities like driving and/or sitting around the dinner table for a meal with parents or friends is fast becoming normative behavior.”

For Trachtman and Harlan both, boredom can also be found in the typical classroom, though statistics show that school alone cannot keep students from being connected.

De la Peña said, “Given most teenager’s vast experience with the torrents of images and sounds provided by contemporary electronic media, with ever fast-moving and multimodal video games, and with electronically-mediated social connectivity tools, the traditional classroom scenario of the teenage student being expected to sit at a desk for 45 to 50 minutes while listening to a teacher presenting on a subject without the aid of attention-engaging multimedia and/or connectivity tools would be expected to experience a high degree of boredom for a relatively large percentage of teenage students.”

“Several educators have told me their dismay at seeing 90 percent of their students flipping open their cell phones or laptops within seconds after the class is over or when the bell rings. How are we going to keep the average teenager on the farm (the traditional classroom) once he has seen Paris?”