Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”(1)
Recently I've spent some time reading and thinking about Ireland's children. Our kids have the curious distinction of being the first generation of digital natives, and many books (like this one and this one) are now being written to help older generations understand the altered existence their kids have, relative to the teenaged experience we (or our parents) had. There are some who think the state of continuous partial attention (or permanent distraction) brought about by constant exposure to different streams of information from many sources is causing more problems than it might solve.
David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.
The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.
[...]
Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.
So, are our kids going to be a generation of information nibbling bilbliophobes with the short term memory of a heroin-addicted goldfish? Most likely not, though several professors seem to feel so, and Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic chronicles their experiences:
“I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
It's telling that Carr's article takes us back to the 1880's, to Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his decision to buy a typewriter. The effect of changing from hand-written text to typewritten text had an effect on the character of the great man's thought his readers could sense. Nietzsche wrote (or typed) that
“our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
So with our reading equipment--books versus screens and e-book readers.
To see the difference in attitude a change of medium can affect, read this article on getting a word processor for the first time---in 1982.
Assuming the time allocated to gathering information hasn't increased by much recently, and with more and more light reading taking place online, less and less light reading will be done, implying a collapse of demand for traditional light reading, like magazines. Do we see this happening? Hell yeah.
Lad's magazines, teenaged magazines, and general magazines all saw their circulations fall, year on year, in the last 3 years. News magazines like The Economist have fared much better.
There's more to be written on this topic, as it is perennial. We'll never understand our children's generation. Nor will they understand their children's generation. That seems to be the way of things. But it does get a lot of books published.
Interesting data Stephen. There's some other studies doing the rounds putting the global cost of chronic distraction at between $650B and $900B. Before the financial meltdown started, this looked like one of the bigger problems facing modern enterprises. The information overload research group (IORG) has gathered much of the the research in this area at iorgforum.org