Download issue (PDF) - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

Mark, an informatics professor at the
University of California, Irvine and
a leader in the field of “interruption
science.” In studies across a range of
industries, she and other researchers
have found that office workers change
tasks on average every three minutes
throughout the day. An e-mail, instant
message, phone call, colleague’s
question, or a new thought prompts
an interruption. Once interrupted, it
takes nearly 25 minutes to return to an
original task. Half of the time, people
are interrupting themselves.
The risks are clear. “If you’re continually
interrupted and switching
thoughts, it’s hard to think deeply
about anything,” Mark once observed
to me. “How can you engage with
something?”
In our rapid-fire, split-focus era, are
we able to process, filter and reflect
well on the tsunamis of information
barraging us daily? Are we hearing,
but not listening? If this continues
to be the way we work, learn and
report, could we be collectively nurturing
new forms of ignorance, born
not from a dearth of information as
in the past, but from an inability or
an unwillingness to do the difficult
work of forging knowledge from the
data flooding our world?
I see worrisome signs that our climate
of distraction undermines our
ability to think deeply. Consider that
nearly a third of workers are so busy
or interrupted that they often feel
they do not have time to reflect on
the work that they do, according to
the Families and Work Institute. David
M. Levy, a professor at the University
of Washington, has even held a highlevel
MacArthur Foundation-funded
conference tellingly called, “No Time to
Think.” And for all their tech-fluency,
younger generations often have trouble
evaluating and assessing information
drawn from the Web, studies show.
For example, a new national exam of
information literacy, the Educational
Testing Service’s “iSkills” assessment
test, found that just half of college
students could judge the objectivity
of a Web site, and just over a third
could correctly narrow an overly broad
online search.
Multitasking and the News
News consumption fares no better,
according to a small but in-depth
recent study of 18- to 34-year-olds
commissioned by The Associated
Press. The 18 participants, who were
tracked by ethnographers for days,
consumed a “steady diet of bite-size
pieces of news,” almost always while
multitasking. Their news consumption
was often “shallow and erratic,”
In our rapid-fire, splitfocus
era, are we able to
process, filter and reflect
well on the tsunamis of
information barraging us
daily? Are we hearing, but
not listening?
even as they yearned to go beyond the
brief and often repetitive headlines
and updates that barraged them daily.
Participants “appeared debilitated by
information overload and unsatisfying
news experiences,” researchers
observed. Moreover, “when the news
wore them down, participants in the
study showed a tendency to passively
receive versus actively seek news.”
[See related article by the AP’s Jim
Kennedy on page 68.]
This is a disturbing portrait: multitasking
consumers uneasily “snacking”
on headlines, stuck on the surface of
the news, unable to turn information
into knowledge.
Are consumers lazy? Are the media
to blame? Or is Google making us
stupid, as a recent Atlantic magazine
cover story asked? It’s far too
simplistic to look for a single culprit,
a clear-cut driver of such changes.
Rather, helped by influential tools
that are seedbeds of societal change,
we’ve built a culture over generations
that prizes frenetic movement, frag-
Youthful Perspectives
mented work, and instant answers.
Just today, my morning paper carried
a front-page story about efforts “in a
new age of impatience” to create a
quick-boot computer. Explained one
tech executive, “It’s ridiculous to ask
people to wait a couple of minutes”
to start up their computer. The first
hand up in the classroom, the hyperbusinessman
who can’t sit still, much
less listen—these are markers of success
in American society.
Of course, the news business has
always been quick, fast and fueled by
multitasking. Reporters work in one of
the most distracting of milieus—and
yet draw on reserves of just-in-time
focus to meet deadlines. Still, perhaps
today we need to consider how much
we can shrink editorial attention
spans, with our growing emphasis
on “4D” newsgathering, Twitter-style
reporting, and newsfeeds from citizen
bloggers whose influence far outstrips
any hard-won knowledge of the difficult
craft of journalism. It’s not just
news consumers who are succumbing
to a dangerous dependence on what’s
first up on Google for making sense
of their world.
Ultimately, our new world does
more than speed life up and pare
the news down. Most importantly,
our current climate undermines the
trio of skills—focus, awareness and
planning/judgment—that make up
the crucial human faculty of attention.
When we split our focus, curb our
awareness, and undercut our ability
to gain perspective, we diminish our
ability to think critically, carry out
deep learning, or be creative. Can we
afford to create an attention-deficient
economy or press, or build a healthy
democracy from a culture of distraction?
Absolutely not. �
Maggie Jackson is the author of “Distracted:
The Erosion of Attention and
the Coming Dark Age,” published by
Prometheus Books in June 2008. She
writes the “Balancing Acts” column
in The Boston Globe, and her work
has appeared in The New York Times,
BusinessWeek and on NPR, among
other national publications.
Nieman Reports | Winter 2008 27