The War On Flow, 2009: Why Studies About Multitasking Are Missing The Point

So, the war on flow continues. I liked the study from a few years back that equated multitasking with smoking dope in its effects, and perhaps the most masterful attack was leveled by Christine Rosen in her Myth Of Multitasking (see Christine Rosen Joins The War On Flow), or Nick Carr, who said the Web is making us stupid. They are all looking backward, and using old tools to measure, ineffectively, what is emerging.

A recent Stanford study suggests that multitasking does not indicate any special cognitive advantages to getting things done, which surprised the researchers and caused glee to percolate through the media circus:

[via The Mediocre Multitasker by Ruth Pennebaker]

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

The piece goes on in this tone, with supporting quotes from the study’s researchers, who point out that they expected the opposite. They had thought that multitaskers would have higher efficiency at the various programmed, lab experiments being thrown at them. Instead, they found that the multitaskers were less efficient at everything.

In their own words:

[via Cognitive control in media multitaskers by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner]

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

And, by extension, a distinctly inefficient approach.

But wait.

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don’t operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused.

If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will always lose. But the juggler is doing something different. You could argue that doing it that way makes no sense, that throwing one ball at a time is more efficient, leads to less sleepless nights, and doesn’t confuse the mind. But it isn’t juggling.

I don’t perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don’t know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that activity, but in most cases that is not the case. And simply forcing myself to focus on the next thing in the activity would not lead to an acceptable or beneficial result, necessarily.

It’s like a painter with a number of works in process. My primary motivation is not getting a particular painting ‘done’, but adding dabs of paint that I feel are the right ones.

I am trying to remain connected to a community of other edglings — those whose writings I am reading, and to whom I am responding with my own writing. I reject the notion that media is a stream of soulless ‘content’ that I am ‘consuming’. As a result, I read differently than than someone who simply wants to scan the headlines. An article may cause me to look something up, and I read that, and I need to let some inchoate idea at the back of my mind bubble for a day before taking any measurable action.

So, if you were to measure my performance, it would look bad compared to someone who mechanically read things and then took a reading comprehension test. I’m too slow. He’s done, and I’m looking out the window, thinking about something in the second paragraph.

But all the means that these researchers used to measure the work of the ‘multitaskers’ were about personal productivity in the face of controlled stimuli. The researchers know what is ‘interference from irrelevant task sets’ in an artificial way. How can we know what is irrelevant information in the real world? What if external stimuli *is* relevant in some unknown way?

So, if you’d like to measure people in today’s world, perhaps you need different metrics.

Let’s use a food analogy. Measuring my relationship to food is not about how many times I chew, or how quickly I decide what food to eat, or how many meals I can cram into a day. It would have to involve qualitative judgments about the taste of the food I cook, the range and healthfulness of the foods I choose, and the conversation around the table at dinner. Efficiency doesn’t enter into it, except as a secondary consideration.

The best food is not made by people who eat the fastest.

If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will always lose. But the juggler is doing something different. You could argue that doing it that way makes no sense, that throwing one ball at a time is more efficient, leads to less sleepless nights, and doesn’t confuse the mind. But it isn’t juggling.

The best food is not made by people who eat the fastest.

Learning how to juggle doesn’t make you a genius, I’ll grant you. It doesn’t help you do long division in your head, or learn French more quickly. It just lets you diffuse your focus, spread your hand-eye coordination, and perform many small movements at once while telling a joke. And the joke might be better told while not juggling, but that’s not the point, either.

This media flow is something like juggling, in that way. We are switching back and forth from the words we are reading, to the words we’d like to respond with, and a growing understanding of the people involved in the discussion. There is a lot of social understanding involved, as in “What did Jay Rosen think about Tim O’Brien’s argument when he wrote that?”

So, I maintain that studies like this continue to miss the point. If you use industrial era yardsticks based on personal productivity to try to figure out what is going on in our heads, here, in the web of flow, you will simply think we are defective. We’ll have to learn how to measure the larger scope — the first and second closure of our networks — and distill from our media-based interactions how we influence and support each other. Get away from counting the calories, and get into how it all tastes.