An onslaught of books and articles confirms what many of us have known for some time: multi-tasking, in any meaningful sense, is a mirage. Particularly for the daily tasks of the office commuter, one simply cannot email and phone, phone and drive, and so on, without degrading each individual task. The behavioral deficit may be abetted by a nasty side-effect: “rewiring” our brains in a way that cannot be undone.
The latest entry is Brian Appleyard’s deftly written “Stoooopid .... Why the Google Generation Isn’t as Smart as It Thinks: The Digital Age is Destroying Us by Ruining Our Ability to Concentrate"
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4362950.ece --I especially that he mentions that all the worry may be the usual hand-wringing of this generation’s older generation. Still, he comes down firmly on the pessimist’s side.
If we really are caught up in a “phog,” what should we do? I suggest that it is not enough to tell people to disconnect, even though such advice makes sense to those of us who existed before the Web. We need to be strategic: if you want, say, a teenager to learn the importance of single focus, then you must demonstrate its value. Doing so is not so hard. For example, if teachers asked students to memorize short quotes, then slip them strategically into conversations throughout their days (and this is the sort of lesson taught in Antiquity), then teenagers—and young adults—understand immediately the benefits of deep focus. I realize that this focus is not the same as that required for artistic, mathematical, scientific, and other like immersions, but it is a start.
While technological consumer clutter partly got us into this mess, I do suspect that the very same may help us out of it a bit. For example, it won’t be long before we can create online avatars to handle low-level inquiries, presences that are programmed with our usual responses. We may well come to see these as extensions of ourselves. I strongly believe that we will do so someday, even if it is long after I am gone.
In the meantime, we need strengthened “out-of-office” replies that allow us to engage in off-line thinking. Some cognitive psychologists and linguists claim that language, particularly written language, offered us the ability to download some mental tasks into the environment (for example, ones that require remembering locations and directions), thus freeing more room for thinking other thoughts. In addition, language itself helps build a cognitive space for that off-line thinking, detached from immediate action—thus, we can conceive alternative futures.
It is perverse that our tools are reclaiming our online thinking, but we can build new ones that wall it off, too.
