The Myth of Monotasking - Cathy Davidson via HASTAC
Why the debate about attention — multi- versus mono-tasking — is really about institutions:
Cathy Davidson, The Myth Of Monotasking
[…] If we want to change our institutions, we have to believe that it is the institutional structures that are the problem, not the new conditions of life that institutions should be supporting. That is, if we believe that technology is making us dumb, distracted, shallow, and lonely—as some have said—then we should be insisting that school stay exactly as stultifying, bubble-tested, standardized, and hierarchical as it is now. By contrast, if we realize that we are in the midst of a monumental historical change and one reason we feel distracted and disjointed is because there is a mismatch between the educational institutions that help to form us and the changed world in which we live, then there is motivation to change our institutions to help us in this new world.
So attention is key. I side with those neuroscientists who argue the brain doesn’t know how to “monotask.” Multitasking is a way of life, and disruption is what saves us from our own attention blindness. Right now, we are often blind to how much how world has changed and how essential it is to change our institutions to support that change.
And, I believe, the institutions involved are not just schools, but work. We need to change the world of work to reflect and support the way our minds actually work, instead of attempting to force ourselves into some ideological mindset. A mindset where our attention must be focused at every second, like a laser, working on the next task in our work queue. However, cognitive science shows that this is folklore — or religious doctrine — rather than an appraisal of how we actually operate cognitively. This is the war on flow I have been writing about for years.
This is not dissimilar to the obsession in Western culture with individuality and autonomy, which is such a strong bias that people are unwilling to accept how much of our cognition is social, and that many of the behaviors we consider individual are in fact group phenomena.
Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them. It’s not easy to acknowledge that everything we’ve learned about how to pay attention means that we’ve been missing everything else.
It’s not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we’ve been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.
I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that’s based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.
Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.
307,369 Crashes Means Very Few Of Us Are Supertaskers. Yet.
I am not advocating texting while driving, which has reportedly led to 307,369 crashes so far this year, according to estimates from the National Safety Council. But I do feel its a good policy to keep to scientific facts about attention, even when announcing beneficial policies:
Keeping Eyes on Distracted Driving’s Toll
At the news briefing, Dr. Andrew Pollak, president of the trauma association, said: “It isn’t just cellphones. It’s anything that takes our attention from the task of driving.”
David L. Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, added: “No one does multitasking well.”
It turns out that in fact there are some people who do multitasking well. These are known as ‘supertaskers’ by the researchers that discovered their paradoxical existence, Jason Watson and David Strayer at the University of Utah (Supertaskers: Profiles In Extraordinary Multitasking Ability).
As I reported last year,
Watson and Strayer tested 200 subjects in a controlled fashion, and determined that 2.5% of the group could in fact drive in a difficult car simulation while conversing on the phone without significant loss of ability of the individual tasks. The ‘conversing on the phone’ wasn’t just talking about TV: it was a complex set of behaviors called OSPAN tasks, like remembered lists of items while performing mathematical calculations.
The authors state, unequivocally:
Supertaskers are not a statistical fluke. The single-task performance of supertaskers was in the top quartile, so the superior performance in dual-task conditions cannot be attributed to regression to the mean. However, it is important to note that being a supertasker is more than just being good at the individual tasks. While supertaskers performed well in single-task conditions, they excelled at multi-tasking.This means that there are some of us who can drive and talk on the phone safely. And it seems like their superpower is multitasking itself, not just the ability to do these two specific things together.
So, I will make the conjecture that multitasking is a cognitive skill which — like mathematical reasoning and musical ability — occurs in a bell curve distribution across the population. Watson and Strayer discovered some folks that are three standard deviations above the norm, who had functionally zero decrease in their performance in the individual tasks when asked to do more than one at a time. But all of us fall somewhere on that curve. And as with most cognitive skills, we can improve.
Note that it takes a great long time, on the order of 10,000 hours, to gain mastery of complex skills like piano playing and kung fu. It may take that long to become great at multitasking, for the average among us.
So it is categorically false to say that no one is good at multitasking.
And like you, I hope that wannabe multitaskers should practice somewhere other than the drivers seat of a moving automobile, at least until they have attained their multitasking black belt, anyway.
Here They Go Again: Multitasking Is The Devil
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it continues to amaze me how quickly the media will pull some scientific research result out of context and use it to claim that napping causes Alzheimers or masturbation leads to poor dental hygiene.
The bête noire in this case is multitasking, which is a regular foil for the Sunday supplement types.
Matt Richtel starts out by linking to a bunch of his own pieces which link multitasking with all sorts of ills, based on his cherry picking of research. Then he reports on a new study about interruption, in which older people were shown to have more difficulty remembering what they were doing after being interrupted than young people.
Matt Richtel, Multitasking Takes Toll on Memory, Study Finds
Researchers said the key finding of the new study is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.
During the study, subjects were asked to look at a scene, then were interrupted for several seconds by an image of a person’s face. They were asked to identify the person’s gender and approximate age, and then returned to answer questions about the earlier scene. Older subjects found it much harder to disengage from the interruption and reestablish contact with the scene, the researchers found.
Even though the study did not revolve around interruptions from cellphones or other gadgets, one researcher said the results provide a “clear extrapolation” to the impact of a stream of incoming rings and buzzes.
“Technology provides so much more of an interference than what we did here,” said the researcher, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Indeed, the paper argues that studies like this are becoming increasingly important as aging adults spend more time in a work force with heavy multitasking demands.
“This issue is growing in scope and societal relevance as multitasking is being fed by a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media,” Dr. Gazzaley said.
Note that the study did not involve technological interruptions of any sort, but Richtel and ‘one researcher’ had no trouble trumpeting this as another proof about the dangers inherent in technological multitasking.
Some old duffer who forgets what he wanted to do in the kitchen because his short-term memory is glitchy is not some definitive proof that mutlitasking — texting while in a conference, or listening to music while doing homework — leads to permanently diminished cognition, even if the neighbor’s dog barked as he walked down the stairs.
Folding Time
Recent research on multitasking by Watson and Strayer at the University of Utah has demonstrated — despite all the Sunday supplement stories to the contrary — that some people CAN effectively multitask, people that Watson and Strayer call ‘supertaskers’.
2.5% of a test group of 200 could in fact drive in a difficult car simulation while conversing on the phone without significant loss of ability of the individual tasks. The ‘conversing on the phone’ wasn’t just talking about TV: it was a complex set of behaviors called OSPAN tasks, like remembered lists of items while performing mathematical calculations.
This means that there are some of us who can drive and talk on the phone safely. And it seems like their superpower is multitasking itself, not just the ability to do these two specific things together.
Obviously, much more research is needed to determine what goes into this. I am going to suggest a few ideas though: Being good at multitasking draws on more than one cognitive center, and no matter who you are, you can get better at multitasking, just like anyone can learn to juggle.
I am also going to suggest that being exposed to certain stimuli — video games, juggling, flight simulators, social streaming, martial arts, playing music — increase our capacity to fold time. And that participating in social groups where others have these skills will reinforce different ways to operate in the world.
Your Brain on Computers - Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity -- Matt Richtel
A group of brain scientists take a rafting trip in Utah out of touch of cell phone rambling about attention, multitasking, and the impacts of disconnecting on cognitive behavior. And it’s interspersed with snippets of commentary about research on attention, etc. But no real case is put together, and the author, Matt Richtel has cherry picked the research, never mentioning research that counters the subtext. Richtel has written other pieces advancing the same case, in which he skips over contradictory evidence, as I reported in Do ‘Supertaskers’ Mean We Are Adapting To A Multiphrenic World?
Richtel seems the NY Times leading critic of being wired and the evils of a multiphrenic world: he is fighting the war on flow.
Do ‘Supertaskers’ Mean We Are Adapting To A Multiphrenic World?
In a full frontal attack on multitasking and the tools that seem to seduce us into it, Matt Richtel makes the case for the evils of being wired by chronicling the day-to-day media addiction of a California entrepreneur and his family. Kord Campbell misses an email from someone who wants to buy his company, his son is getting C’s, and mom gets pissed when Kord reacts to stress by playing video games interminably.
Richtel uses this modern dysfunctional family to advance the conventional interpretation of recent psychological tests and conjectues about human cognition in the wired age:
Matt Richtel, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.
The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
Ok, Richtel is a reporter, not a scientist, so it’s a natural thing for him to start with the conclusions first. But what is the science here?
Just some background, though, to level the playing field.
The human mind is plastic — This is unsurprising, but commonly overlooked. We all can learn new skills, or repurpose existing cognitive centers in our brains when exposed to new situations. That’s how we learn to speak a foreign language, to juggle, or to play the guitar.
Mastery is distinct from learning — The first few weeks when you are trying to learn to play the drums can be humbling, and lead to a lot of bad music. The rule of thumb called the ‘10,000 hour rule’ — made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers — suggests that for many sorts of complex behaviors, like getting a black belt, ten years of very regular practice is a baseline. And while the white belt may be learning valuable skills, he may be no better in a bar room brawl than an average person, and perhaps worse, since her new training may actually slow her responses as she responds intellectually to the situation: her karate is not second nature, yet.
So, the assumption of much of the popular discourse about multitasking is that the cognitive adaptation that happens when we are grappling with wired world is, at base, bad. The reality is that we are always learning, always adapting. Underlying this sense that multitasking is bad is the industrial ideal of personal productivity: we are supposed to be heads down, doing purposeful work as much as possible, and not being distracted by other things that are not relevant to the task at hand. Anything that distracts us from that is an annoyance.
However, the fact is that people need to balance task-oriented work — like writing this post — with the thinking and learning that informs the work and my ability to perform it — like reading the scientific studies cited in Richtel’s article, and thinking about what it means. Or answering the phone while I am writing the post, because I have been trying to close the loop with someone for several days, and this is him calling.
The world is too rich and varied to imagine that there is a path through it where we can simplify our activities to a series of programmed single-tasking activities. So clearly there is a balance. And I propose the following maxim: each person can multitask successfully to some degree, and our ability to multitask is a combination of innate and learned behaviors.
Much of the evidence that Richtel cites — when stripped of the moralistic preaching about media consumption rotting our minds — the usual war on flow stuff — accords with my maxim.
As Richtel cites:
Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.
[… much of the technical discussion in the article is spread all over]
At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.
“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.
What leads these better players to be better? Playing more games? Playing more games against better players? Better teaching from friends? Better genes?
Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.
Many studies show that online activity — like reading — involves more of the brain than reading a book, for example. It seems we are thinking more critically while online, despite all the opportunities for distraction.
And Richtel only touches on one topic for a paragraph, and does not dig into the actual research involved. It seems that at least some people can in fact drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time: Supertaskers.
Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.
That’s it? No mention of who these people are, or what sort of multitasking is involved? No suppositions?
Nope. Richtel wants to get back to his agenda, which is making the case against multitasking.
So I dug up the research which was conducted by Jason M. Watson and David L. Strayer at the University of Utah (Supertaskers: Profiles In Extraordinary Multitasking Ability), instead of just reading other reporters slander the authors. Watson and Strayer tested 200 subjects in a controlled fashion, and determined that 2.5% of the group could in fact drive in a difficult car simulation while conversing on the phone without significant loss of ability of the individual tasks. The ‘conversing on the phone’ wasn’t just talking about TV: it was a complex set of behaviors called OSPAN tasks, like remembered lists of items while performing mathematical calculations.
The authors state, unequivocally:
Supertaskers are not a statistical fluke. The single-task performance of supertaskers was in the top quartile, so the superior performance in dual-task conditions cannot be attributed to regression to the mean. However, it is important to note that being a supertasker is more than just being good at the individual tasks. While supertaskers performed well in single-task conditions, they excelled at multi-tasking.
This means that there are some of us who can drive and talk on the phone safely. And it seems like their superpower is multitasking itself, not just the ability to do these two specific things together.
Obviously, much more research is needed to determine what goes into this. I am going to suggest a few ideas though.
Being good at multitasking draws on more than one cognitive center — I doubt they will find a single gene or region of the brain responsible for multitasking. Like most complex cognitive function, it will involve some extremely diffused network of interaction in our mind. What we have learned about the minds of musicians and zen monks will be related, in some direct way.
No matter who you are, you can get better at multitasking — This will turn out to be like other human activities that involve mastery: it will take a long time, and it is better to have a teacher who is a master. Thinking hard about moving your hands fast — like the barroom challenge of tying to catch a dollar bill between your outstretched fingers — doesn’t work. The only thing that makes your hands move faster is practice: ten years of practice.
The fear mongers will tell us that the web, our wired devices, and remaining connected are bad for us. It will break down the nuclear family, lead us away from the church, and channel our motivations in strange and unsavory ways. They will say it’s like drugs, gambling, and overeating, that it’s destructive and immoral.
But the reality is that we are undergoing a huge societal change, one that is as fundamental as the printing press or harnessing fire. Yes, human cognition will change, just as becoming literate changed us. Yes, our sense of self and our relationships to others will change, just as it did in the Renaissance. Because we are moving into a multiphrenic world — where the self is becoming a network ‘of multiple socially constructed roles shaping and adapting to diverse contexts’ — it is no surprise that we are adapting by becoming multitaskers.
The presence of supertaskers does not mean that some are inherently capable of multitasking and others are not. Like all human cognition, this is going to be a bell-curve of capability. The test that Watson and Strayer devised only pulled out the supertaskers: the one with zero cognitive costs from multitasking. There are others in the text who had a slight cost, and others with higher costs.
Who among us are the most capable multitaskers, and in a position to teach the others? It may not be the case that the specific subjects in Watson and Strayer’s study are the best to teach others how to multitask, but it’s likely that some supertaskers out there are also good teachers.
Expect this to be a hot trend: parents sending their children off to supertasking classes after school, to get a jump on the new century.
Creativity = Runs With Scissors
One of the reasons that I have argued against people that denounce multitasking and the roving side of human intelligence is my deep suspicion that the wellsprings of creativity is involved. Recent studies of brainscans suggest that creativity is indeed linked to the receptors that filter and direct thought. The more creative people are, the more likely they are to be uninhibited about making connections that others do not. Somewhat like schizophrenics, it turns out:
Michelle Roberts, Creative minds ‘mimic schizophrenia’
Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain’s dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” said Professor Ullen.
Mark Millard UK psychologistHe believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.
UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.
“Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes. Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.”
My sense is that those more given to filtering and controlling their thoughts cab get real benefits from that, and so when they are confronted by the more creative folks among us their natural response is to try to get them to stay focused, to stop making so many wisecracks, and get down to business. We are the ones that ran with scissors in art class, bursting with ideas.
However, creatives can’t control the D2 receptors in their heads, and so all the fervent efforts to single track the world just don’t work, or at least, not for very long. Before you know it, even despite our best intentions, we are looking out the window at the clouds, considering the world through very different eyes.
Texting Isn’t The Distraction, Driving Is: A Parable For Social Business
William Saletan, The Body Electric
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.
The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it, because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models, you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary.
With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more. An insurance analyst tells Belfiore that aging baby boomers will lead the way, enlisting robotic drivers to help them get around. For younger drivers, the problem is multitasking. Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.
This is a great example of the figure/ground shift of meaning when you adopt a completely different perspective about some social issue, in this case texting while driving.
The typical response to these shifts casts the new practice, in this case texting, as a negative impact on the more established practice, in this case driving. This is followed by calls for new laws and new penalties for those attempting to mix the two.
Don’t get me wrong: I agree that texting while driving is dangerous. But other practices that have long been tolerated, like changing radio stations or eating while driving, are dangerous too. However, these are grandfathered because they are as long-established as cars are. No one freaks out because someone has an accident while eating a danish: it’s just accepted as part of the baseline hazards of driving, like fender benders in parking lots.
The revolution in perception is to consider driving the car the distraction that takes your attention away from texting. Then the push is on to invent new technologies to change the basis of driving, instead of regulating texting.
In the social business context, this is similar to the acceptance of the personal element of social networking online, the acceptance that human life is lived in specific connections with other specific people, not in some generalized business context where workers are interchangeable parts.
Management often responds to the adoption of social tools the way that public policy has responded to texting while driving: they make it illegal to be social while working.
The far-sighted response will be to make it easier to gain the benefits of social business, and to rethink the organization and management of work around human nature instead to persisting in trying to ‘rise above’ what makes us people in the first place.
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.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
