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.

In retrospect, the debates about whether schooling dulls the brain or whether newspapers damage the fabric of society seem peculiar, but our children will undoubtedly feel the same about the technology scares we entertain now. It won’t be long until they start the cycle anew.

A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. - By Vaughan Bell - Slate Magazine (via steph)

The Elusive Big Idea - Neal Gabler

Neal Gabler suggests that we are rapidly moving into a Post-Idea era, hastened by the rise of the Internet and social tools:

In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems. Freud taught us to explore our minds as a way of understanding our emotions and behaviors. Einstein rewrote physics. More recently, McLuhan theorized about the nature of modern communication and its effect on modern life. These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

But the analogy isn’t perfect. For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

Gabler obviously hasn’t actually spent any time on Twitter talking with people who are concerned with ideas. And he also seems to be unaware of the recent surge in long format writing online.

Just another condemnation from a backwards-looking enemy of the future, like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, wailing about the lost virtues of a golden era that we have fallen from.

Just to inject some facts: there doesn’t seem to be an decrease in the development of new ideas. Consider the number of patents created worldwide, that continue to increase year by year. Or the number of new words: although I bet that Gabler wouldn’t say “defriend’ or “frenemy”.

Gabler is selectively pointing at some set of behaviors that annoy him, and declaring it the fall of Western civilization. And he is explicitly saying that what we do online is illegitimate, immature, and probably immoral. This is what I have been calling ‘the war on flow’ for years, but perhaps I should simplexify and call him a social counterrevolutionary.

But what about ideas like the iPad, or digital books? Social networks, which have transformed modern society even if you don’t like them. What about open source software development, or cloud-based computing, or augmented reality? These are just a few examples of big ideas that are changing the world, and there are thousands more.

And, by the way, the rise of digital books seems to be breathing new life into the world of publishing, which is all about the dissemination of ideas, after all. The Bookstats survey shows that publishing had a 5.6% increase between 2010 and 2008, and ebooks grew from 0.6% to 6.4%.

So I think ideas have a fighting chance, despite us twittering online.

Google , Facebook and Online Reality - Virginia Heffernan

Heffernan thinks Google+ has all the attractiveness of a weekend at a dude ranch: empty and sort of fake. And she ends up suggesting that Facebook has changed the meaning of ‘real’ — as in real friends — and we are complicit. Somehow we went along with the trickery of web pages becoming social contexts, even though we are just staring at computer screens.

This straddle might make for good page views, but I don’t think it adds much to the discussion, and her implied ambivalence is intended to seem reasonable, but it rings hollow to me, as if she feels that she should be ambivalent, but instead she is simply curious and eager, and frightened at the avidity of her participation.

Another Potshot At Web Culture: The Isidious Evils Of ‘Like’ Culture

The basis of caricature is to select a few prominent features of a subject, and then to overdo them: a large nose becomes larger, a slight regional accent becomes a drawl, a nervous nose rub becomes a psychotic tic.

Neil Strauss takes the ‘like’ gesture, and enlarges it until it becomes a bogeyman that threatens to consume individual liberty and Western civilization. As he writes in the Wall Street Journal, a bastion of free expression on the web, [with my comments in brackets]:

Neil Strauss, The Insidious Evils Of ‘Like’ Culture

“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

[Oh, of course, people should be islands complete unto themselves. That whole notion about being socialized, and that we need to be connected to others to find the fullest expression of our inner selves? Or the idea that self esteem is rooted in the idea of being competent to deal with the basic challenges of life, which largely involve other people? Nah.]

Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do.

[We wouldn’t want to be shaped by the social gestures of our culture, right? We should ignore that and listen to… what exactly? Inner voices? Our mothers? Authors of self-help books?]

Because it’s so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, “likes” and view counts, social media have become the métier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art—or even into their own Web ventures.

[And after all, fooling around with web garbage is lower than books, music, or art, which are well-established cultural outlets, supported by Ivy League schools, unlike all that social media nonsense, (or street art, or any other artform-that-snobs-tut-tut-at.]

The same is true of the productivity of already established writers and artists. I was recently on a radio show with an author who, the interviewer said, had tweeted, on average, every 20 minutes for the past two years. Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.

[Mustn’t get involved in new media when there is so much money to be made exploiting some established literary or musical persona! Oh, and forget that musicians and authors rely on other sorts of user feedback — like sales numbers or leader boards — from which they derive socially-grounded self-esteem.]

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has “constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”

[Forget for a minute that Fromm wrote this over 60 years ago, in reference to the cultural strictures of his day, the peak of the industrial age. And let’s pretend he intended his words as a condemnation of today’s emerging post-industrial web. Please don’t connect these dots: whatever you do, please forget that web culture is an antidote to the monstrous machine that Fromm was writing about.]

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same.

[How can you know what makes you different from everyone else if you are ignoring social discourse, and reading old books in some dusty room?]

Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think.

[Finally, something I can agree with. But, what exactly has that got to do with the like button?]

And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

[Wait a second. I’m confused. You said “‘Like’ culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem”, but now you say that microblogging leads to quick fixes of self-esteem. Could it be that more microblogging could lead to deeper self-esteem, instead of just quick fixes, then?]

I reject his arguments, chapter and verse. There is no a priori reason that microblogging can’t deliver well-constructed arguments or insights to readers… or transcendent joy, for that matter. Just in passing, it is also untrue that street art is merely vandalism, or that comic books can’t express deep human truths, which Strauss doesn’t bring up, but which are the sorts of skirmishes that cultural elitists relish.

Strauss is a cultural elitist, a conservative who believes that the old ways are the best ways, and what’s novel is suspect, and inherently of lesser and — questionable — value to society. He is dismissive, and casts about for a rock to throw, so he questions how the ‘like’ gesture might conjecturally harm our self-esteem.

The Spaniards have a saying, ‘Que no hayan novedades’, which can be translated as ‘May no new thing arise’. Perhaps that saying would have been a more apt quotation in Strauss’ caricature than Erich Fromm’s raging against the industrial machine of his day.

Practically every week some magazine runs a story about how email, cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., have diminished the quality of face-to-face communication. In 2009 the New York Times profiled a family of six in which every member, including the five-year old, starts the day by grabbing a nearby electronic gadget instead of talking to each other. There is nothing new about the fear that technology is harming human interaction. People philosophized and worried about telegraphs and telephones in very much the same way that people now philosophize and worry about the Internet. In an 1880 novel titled Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes two telegraph operators carried on a very politely Victorian version of cybersex and pondered whether they had a “real” relationship. Going back even further, Plato fretted about the impact of writing on human interaction 2,400 years ago in the Phaedrus. (To see that writing is a technology, consider what it would take for you to create a pen, ink, and paper on your own.) Plato argued that unlike its author, a written text could not engage in conversation; if questioned it would simply give the same answer again. Knowledge only truly exists in human interaction, he said. He concluded that by seducing people into believing that they can obtain knowledge from solitary reading, the written word threatens human ties.

The debate about technology’s effects on social interaction has been around for so long that it is essentially technology-independent. I see it as being about the tension between conflicting desires for autonomy and community. On the one hand we want to be autonomous, and seek space and privacy. On the other hand we want to be known and loved, and seek intimacy and community. These desires are in constant conflict. By constantly introducing new ways to be alone and together, technology keeps renewing the conflict. The conflict endures through the millennia; only the specific technologies change.

Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind

The Social Backlash: The War Against Social Culture

As the newest enemy of the future to come forward, and write (yet another) book that attacks the rise of a social culture, Sherry Turkle is being warmly received by the Sunday supplement naysayers, who desperately want to illegitimize what we are doing online. The newest example is below, where are are told that Twitter and Facebook are driving us crazy, our online relationships are ersatz and cheapen ‘real’ connection, and that school kids are becoming addicted to the dopamine that squirts in their brains every time they make a friend on Facebook.

Charles Lawrence, Twitter and Facebook are driving us mad, says prof

Just two text-ready words may have punctured the delusion of cyberspace ‘connectedness’ that has gripped a twittering new world: ‘Alone Together’. They are the title of a book from a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has finally plucked up the courage to tell us something we all secretly know: we are losing our minds to a mania for the social media of Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging.

We are in danger of relinquishing our humanity to “social robotics” and a “new social confusion.” We are swapping real life for vicarious life.

There have been warnings before from shrinks and sociologists, not to mention anyone with the commonsense to have got angry at those texting away under the dinner table or the idiot bumping into you because he is buried in his Blackberry.

But Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book is the first to get the message through. Alone Together has sparked debate on where all this is taking us. The backlash has begun.

And so, of course, has the backlash to the backlash. Every book reviewer, commentator and reporter can, after all, be “reached on Twitter”. The word Luddite buzzes through cyberspace.

However furiously the fingers tap the interactive screens, however, it is hard to dispute Turkle’s argument.

“We’re using inanimate objects to convince ourselves that even when we’re alone, we feel together,” she writes. “And then when we are with each other, we put ourselves in situations where we feel alone – constantly on our mobile devices.

“It’s what I call a perfect storm of confusion about what’s important in our human connections. In solitude, new intimacies, in intimacies, new solitude.”

Talking to school kids, she finds that they are so used to hiding behind the cyber-walls of Twitter, text and Facebook posts that they are actually afraid to make a telephone call, let alone look someone in the eye at a face-to-face meeting.

Turkle, a psychology professor in MIT’s Science, Technology and Society programme, warns that all this is as addictive as dope, and for the same reason. “The adrenaline rush is continual,” she says. “We get a little shot of dopamine every time we make a connection.”

Having the latest device offers the same kind of dopamine rush. They are flaunted by the types who think that he or she who gets the most messages at the party or the business meeting wins. They have no idea that they are simply the cheap version of the old style social climber who pays the waiter to whisper in his ear that he is wanted on the telephone, urgently.

“It is a huge backlash,” says William Kist, a professor of education at Kent State University, Ohio. “The different kinds of communication people are using have become something that scares people.” He is a fan of ‘communication’, however, saying that what is needed is a new ‘netiquette’.

It had better come soon. There have already been studies indicating that the cyber clatter is numbing the brain, shortening the attention span, limiting the ability for real conversations, and eroding the bonds - such as empathy - that hold us together.

“We have forgotten how to respond ethically, emotionally and intellectually to the challenges, desires and opportunities of life at home and at work,” says Michael Bugeja, who wrote Interpersonal Divide in 2004, before anyone was ready to pay attention. His conclusion even then? The more connected, the more isolated.

Uproar over Turkle’s book has brought all sorts of academic tomes out off the back shelves. Evgeny Morozov – heard of him? – argues that social media makes people “slackovists”, always ready to post an opinion but never to do anything useful.

Mark Bauerlein of Emory University has a book out called simply The Dumbest Generation. “The intellectual future of the US looks dim,” he writes. A neuro-science project has studied the ‘brainwaves’ of teenagers playing video games while texting and keeping their eye on the Facebook page. Patterns of brain activity lit up the scanners in phenomenal displays of multi-tasking. But the same brains glowed only dimly when asked to focus on writing a story or solving a math problem.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” warns Turkle. “We’ve gone through tremendously rapid change, and some of these things just need a little sorting out.”

It’s all extremely knuckle-headed. 

When I was a child this sort of story in the paper would be about the dangers of reading comic books and watching television. Then it was video games. Now, the glories of western civilization are being trashed by wired dopamine addicts who have forgotten what authentic intimacy is, we are told. 

News flash: we feel connected because we are connected. It is not phony. It is not pretend. This is not a fantasy.

Please read the actual science that shows the reality of what’s going on, instead of this psychobabble. Check out posts here www.stoweboyd.com/tagged/social+cognition, and ignore the mumblers who are ideologically bent on undermining the new culture we are building on the web.

I do believe we are headed for a new consciousness, a new state of cognition, where we will have different values, perceptions, modes of reasoning, and behaviors. We will reject a great deal of what is conventional wisdom today. That’s why it’s a culture war: the war against social culture. They will say what we are doing is immature, immoral, illegitimate. But they are wrong, and since they don’t participate in the new web, they can’t really understand what is happening.

No Flow In The Coffee Shop, Please!

Nick Bilton finds that coffee shops are prohibiting computers (and e-readers):

Nick Bilton, No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment

A few weeks ago I decided to mosey over to a local Manhattan coffee shop for an afternoon cappuccino.

After placing my order I sat down at a table and pulled out my Amazon Kindle.

I barely made it a sentence into the e-book I was reading before an employee of the coffee shop came by, stood over me and said, “Excuse me sir, but we don’t allow computers in the coffee shop.”

I looked up at him with an incredulous look and replied, “This isn’t a computer, it’s an e-book reader.”

He then told me that the “device” in my hand had a screen and required batteries, so it was obviously “some variation of a computer.” The coffee shop, I was told, did not allow the use of computers.

Annoyed with this distinction, I peppered the employee with questions on why reading on paper was more acceptable than reading on a screen. Flustered and confused by the existential debate he had been dragged into, the employee resolutely said, “Look, no computers in the coffee shop.”

At face value, the coffee shop owners are trying to push out the freeloaders that occupy a table for three hours after buying an Americano. But I maintain that something more insidious is at work, since they don’t kick you out for reading or listening to music.

They know that you are using the computer — forget the e-reader — to remain connected to the world outside the coffee shop. This is just another oddball version of the war on flow. The restaurants that prohibit phone calls, the Sunday supplement sermons about multitasking, the endless articles telling us to focus on one thing at a time.

I’m not even sure that coffee shops can legally prohibit people from doing specific legal activities, like using a computer. Airlines can do so for supposed safety issues, but what’s the rationale in a coffee shop? 

Imagine a sign at Starbucks saying “No laughing, noon-3pm”, or “Please do not use the bathrooms for putting on make-up”, “Sign language prohibited”, or “Guests are required to keep their elbows off the table.” These would be laughable or blatantly illegal.

My bet is that coffee shops might be able to restrict people from hanging out more than a certain number of hours or minutes, based on loitering regulations, but it is probably illegal to single out people using laptops this way.  Since restaurants are “places of public accommodation” they are subject to equal protection laws, and as a result, they cannot eject people who are using laptops (or ebooks) for occupying tables. This is singling out a certain group of people — like teenagers, or bikers — and that is prohibited by the 14th Amendment as discriminatory. It would be legitimate to chase out freeloaders after some period of time, but it would be necessary to demonstrate that all patrons were treated in the same way. So, if you pull out a laptop while enjoying your latte, and they eject you for doing so, you could sue for damages, and you would likely win. Just my opinion, though.

I think Nick and I should stage a sit-in at one of these establishments, and challenge them in the courts. No discrimination against geeks!

Christine Rosen Joins The War On Flow

Christine Rosen, in The New Atlantis, does a masterful job of collating all the arguments against multitasking in her Myth Of Multitasking. I discovered the piece this morning courtesy of the editorial staff of the New York Times, who put it in the Reading File with the uncritical lede, “In The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen explores the dangers of multitasking.”

Note: the title does not mean that people aren’t multitasking, just that its purported benefits are mythical. And what are those supposed benefits? Well, she sort of charges right past that with a handwave:

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.

Well, at least in my case, I am not trying to do as many things simultaneously as possible, as quickly as possible, using as many technologies as possible. I am trying to remain connected to a large, sprawling network of thousands of edglings, and to gain an understanding of the world through that connection. The instant messaging, blogging, RSS readers, and other tools are merely a means to accomplish that, and in fact, a necessary one.

But Rosen doesn’t explore these aspirations of sociality at all, or really examine motivations at any more depth than setting up a strawman with the express purpose of burning it down.

It is heartening that Rosen did look into the modern cognitive studies about attention, and did report on some of the positive results about multitasking and attention:

[from The Myth of Multitasking.

Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,” as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice.

Uh, yes, simple skills like flying fighter jets at Mach 4, or playing basketball. Nearly every sort of physical skill mastery involves multitasking. Meyer’s and other researchers work is directed toward discovering how people can learn to coordinate many complex tasks. We have yet to be able to conduct magnetic resonance tests on basketball players or fighter pilots, but that’s clearly where the researchers want to get to.

As usual, Rosen is focused on the efficiency of task switching, and not its effects, because her arguments are totally industrial age. The presumption is that individual productivity is the highest good, and anything that deviates from that is bad. What if we are multitasking without trying to be more efficient?

She continues:

But his [Meyer’s] research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

My contention is that as people become more used to multitasking they are stressed by it less. More research is needed in that area.

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context or in framing questions, as any successful trial attorney knows. Evidence shows that we reconstruct memories out of fragments, or by contextual associations with more general knowledge.

[from Kluge by Gary Marcus]

In the final analysis, we would be nowhere without memory; as Steven Pinker once wrote “To a very great extent, our memories are ourselves.” Yet memory is arguably the mind’s original sin. So much is built on it, and yet it is, especially in comparison with computer memory, wildly unreliable.

[…]

In the final analysis, the fact that our ability to make inferences is built on rapid but unreliable contextual memory isn’t some optimal tradeoff. It’s just a fact of history: the brain circuits that allow us to make inferences make do with distortion prone memory because that’s all evolution had to work with. To build a truly reliable memory, fit for the requirements of human deliberate reasoning, evolution would have to start over. And, despite its power and elegance, that’s the one thing that evolution can’t do.

My suggestion is that Rosen, and the other detractors of the multitasking flow state, takes it as a given that optimizing our (truly miserable) human memory is obvious. My belief is that we are shifting to alternative forms of cognition where the context is relied on more than our flaky memories.

[she goes on]

If, as Poldrack concluded, “multitasking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. “I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”

Who says kids are getting an excess of simultaneous media? They are definitely shifting their consciousness, and these media are becoming non-rivalrous (don’t require foreground full attention). But the ‘excess’ is pejorative and judgmental.

She has made her case with a few modern studies and some apparently alarming statistics about young people, and then she quotes the infamous study that equated multitasking with smoking dope. Of course she quotes Linda Stone, who characterized continuous partial attention an affliction of executives: “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.” She quotes the author of CrazyBusy, Edward Hallowell, who suggests we are driving ourselves crazy or at least ADD.

And then she wheels out William James:

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

It may be that in this age — unlike Jame’s 1890s — we need to retain the youthful mind-wandering instead of a settled sort of thinking in comfortable and well-worn ruts. The evidence that learning while multitasking leads to memories being laid down in different areas of the brain, areas associated with learning not settled memories, also suggests that we are responding to an imperative: we need a new sort of thinking, and a new sort of memory, to deal with this new century.

Rosen is looking back, wistfully, to a time when things were simpler, quieter, and less hurried. Just like Nick Carr, who believes the Web is making is stupid because we don’t think the way we used to, Rosen is suggesting that the new ways of thinking that we are developing are illegitimate and inferior to what we are leaving behind.

Let’s be clear. One-sided, left-brain dominated thinking, based on the inherent irrationality and content-driven memory of the human mind, is not necessarily the end all and be all of human understanding. And most of what is involved in reasoning is learned, not innate.

Rosen and others would make it seem that the changes in our perceptions, thoughts, and ethics that come from new patterns of interaction through new media are somehow overthrowing a god-given system that is inherent. It is not. The pre-Web industrial mindset is taught. We learn it through family, school and cultural institutions, but mostly through media that we are exposed to.

Boiled down, Rosen’s argument can be turned on its head: We are using new media, and it is changing our perceptions, how we process the world, and the ethics that arise from our beliefs. She would like us to go back to linear time, industrial age norms, and the ethical systems of the last century, where we would, among other things, take it as a given that personal productivity should be placed squarely ahead of all other goods.

At the same time, I can’t disagree that there are messy cognitive issues associated with multitasking, but human reasoning is a mess, across the board. We are born innumerate, irrational, and with terrible memories. We have developed cultural artifacts like writing, math, physics, and logic to counter some of these defects, and they help some of us some of the time.

But there is nothing stopping us from developing new, different, and perhaps better ways to perceive the world and understand it. And we are. And Rosen, even quoting William James, can’t stop us.

Judging the ‘better’ in that assertion will be a job for new — not old — ethics, though.