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Distracted: The New News World and the Fate of
Attention
‘As a term, “multitasking” doesn’t quite do justice to all the ways in which we
fragment our attention.’
BY MAGGIE JACKSON
Last summer, I was a passenger in
a car barreling down a Detroit
highway when I noticed a driver
speeding past us, a magazine propped
up beside his steering wheel. Perhaps
most amazingly, I was the only person
in my group who was surprised by this
high-speed feat of multitasking.
Today, it’s rare to give anything our
full attention. Our focus is fragmented
and diffused, whether we’re conversing,
eating, working, minding our kids—or
imbibing the news. A new hypermobile,
cybercentric and split-focused world
has radically changed the context
of news consumption—and shifted
the environment for newsgathering
as well. Attention is the bedrock of
deep learning, critical thinking, and
creativity—all skills that we need to
foster, not undercut, more than ever
on both sides of the newsmaking
fence. And as we become more culturally
attention-deficient, I worry about
whether we as a nation can nurture
both an informed citizenry—and an
informative press.
It’s easy to point first to rising data
floods as a culprit for our distraction.
More than 100 million blogs and
a like number of Web sites, not to
mention 1.8 million books in print,
spawn so much information that, as
Daniel Boorstin observes, data begin
to outstrip the making of meaning.
“We are captives of information,”
writes the cultural historian Walter
Ong, “for uninterrupted information
can create an information chaos and,
indeed, has done so, and quite clearly
will always do so.”
Yet sense-making in today’s information-rich
world is not just a matter
of how much we have to contend
with but, more importantly, how we
26 Nieman Reports | Winter 2008
approach the 24/7 newsfeed that is
life today. Consider the Detroit driver;
where was he consuming media, and
how much focus was he allotting to
the task?
Increasingly, Americans are on the
go, whatever they’re doing. Just 14
percent of us move each year, yet the
average number of miles that we drive
annually has risen 80 percent during
the past two decades. The car-asmoving-den,
the popularity of power
bars and other portable cuisine, the
rise of injuries related to “textwalking,”
all of these—and more—attest to our
collective hyperactivity. And as we
relentlessly hurry through our days
toting hand-held foods and portable
gadgets, at the same time we keep
one ear or eye on multiple streams
of news-bytes.
Fragmented Attention
As a term, “multitasking” doesn’t quite
do justice to all the ways in which we
fragment our attention. Split-focus is
sometimes simply the result of living
in a highly mediated world. More
than half of children ages eight to 18
live in homes where a television is
on most of the time, an environment
linked to attention difficulties and
lowered parent-child interaction. In
public spaces from elevators to taxis,
screens packed with flickering words
and images are increasingly hard to
avoid. Despite reconnaissance forays
up and down airports, I usually have
to succumb to an inescapable TV blare
while waiting to fly. Former Microsoft
executive Linda Stone deems ours a
landscape of “continuous partial attention.”
Tuning in and out is a way
of life.
But split focus also occurs when we
hopscotch from one task or person to
another, as most famously exemplified
by the lethal crash of a California commuter
train, apparently because the
rail engineer at the helm was texting.
Our veneration of multitasking can be
traced in part to the influential efficiency
guru Frederick W. Taylor, who
counseled that factory work could be
speeded up if broken down into interchangeable
parts. As well, we live in an
era where we seem to believe that we
can shape time at will. We ignore ageold
rhythms of sun and season, strain
to surpass our biological limitations,
and now seek to break the fetters of
mechanized time by trying to do two
or more things at once. Multitasking
is born of a post-clock era.
The result on the job is “work
fragmentation,” according to Gloria