| DISTRACTED The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age Maggie Jackson Bill McKibben (Fwd.) Amherst: Prometheus Books, June 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59102-623-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-59102-623-7 | 327pp. | HC | $25.99 | |
It is the age of the sound bite. No one is ever without their cell phone, which today most likely includes camera and computer functions. People conduct one-sided conversations while wandering around distractedly in public places, and are often seen holding the phones to their ear while driving. Multitasking is valued, despite the studies that tell us dividing our attention between tasks impairs our performance on all those time-shared tasks.
But far more pernicious effects than these can be laid to our technologically facilitated culture of distraction. Journalist Maggie Jackson has long been concerned with information technology and the changes it has wrought in modern society. In this book she undertakes a bold quest: to unravel the nature of our current deficiency in attention span.
The premise of this book is simple. The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Moreover, this disintegration may come at great cost ot ourselves and society. Put most simply, attention defines us and is the bedrock of society. – Page 13 |
That attention deficit is widespread, and widely documented: from the nightly comments of Jay Leno and David Letterman, through popular books like the late Steve Allen's Dumbth, to scientific papers and periodic surveys of student achievement by the Educational Testing Service and others. Jackson cites, and quotes from, a great many sources to show that this is a relatively recent change. She also shows us how different things once were.
I believe I have identified in the text, between the lines or within them, Ms Jackson's fondness for tales of wizardry and magic, androids and robots. Consider her description of Dan Anderson on page 72, or how on pp 237-8 she struggles to keep up with the gray wizard Posner as he strides unfazed by wind and rain up the trail toward Alderwood, the yurt in which he dwells. (OK, he's really a cognitive neuroscientist, his name is Mike Posner, and the yurt is his weekend home. Also he's married, unlike your typical wizard.) And she spends time discussing Domo and Paro, as well as the androids who played flute and chess.
I don't fault her for that; it is a fondness I share. And Clarke's Third Law holds that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What would Ben Franklin's generation — or Franklin Roosevelt's, for that matter — have thought of our digital cameras, our high-end cellular phones,1 our laptop computers? To say nothing of our abilities in medicine, transportation, power generation...
Attention in Benjamin Franklin's day was the thinking man's obedient dog, the faithful servant of civilized man's efforts to overcome primitive superstitions and scientifically understand his world. *
* * "Around 1800, attention made us the masters of exploring ourselves and the world that surrounds us," observed Hagner. "Around 1900, the spaces between ourselves and the world [were] filled by apparatuses, instruments, technologies and all sorts of entertainment." – Page 40 |
It is easy to ridicule the sound-bite society to which these cultural changes have led, or to bemoan the lack of basic knowledge that resulted. Discerning the possible causes for these changes is harder. Discovering potential correctives is more difficult still. Yet that is the quest Jackson undertakes, and her account of it is a fascinating one.
She begins by tracing the roots of our multitasking, eternally busy culture. One factor is technological innovation: Telegraph operators in the 1880s conducted long-distance romances,2 presaging our Internet-facilitated chats and tweets. Blaming new devices, however, is too facile. It is not cell phones that make us rude in restaurants. Nor does Powerpoint leach away our ability to assemble coherent presentations. Look rather to the effect of such devices on our nervous systems. As hunter-gatherers, we evolved to notice extraneous objects and sudden bursts of movement. A more subtle trait is our propensity from infancy to recognize faces and react to the emotions they display. Advertisers make good use of these inborn characteristics, whether they are selling us candy or counting skills.
Television attracts us because its content can challenge our cognition. But foremost, its quick cuts and rapid imagery are designed to keep tugging at our natural inclination to orient toward the shiny, the bright, the mobile—whatever's eye-catching in our environment. It's ingenious: entertainment that hooks us by appealing to our very instincts for survival. – Page 72 |
If these characteristics of brain and nervous system impel us toward distraction, perhaps the study of neurology and cognition can give us remedies. Jackson explores a great number of research efforts, following this hope down strange byways: to the bucolic weekend home of a scientist — a yurt on the Olympic Peninsula — and up into the Rocky Mountains to a secluded retreat north of Estes Park, CO where Buddhists and a team of scientists probe the neurological basis of meditation. This host of research establishments is a bit overwhelming, as is the roster of authorities she presents; it includes William James, Frank Gilbreth and Jane Jacobs as well as contemporary scientists like Michael Posner. The text also introduces us to celebrities like supermodel athlete Aimee Mullins. And there is a multitude of cultural references: not only the novels but oddities like Jacques de Vaucanson's famous flute-playing android, or the Chess-playing Turk.3 The chief defect of her book is a tendency to include so many historical and personal anecdotes, and to dwell too long on them. This occasionally makes it hard to stay focused on where her narrative is going. But it could be argued that this merely reflects the difficulty of documenting the chaotic nature of a fast-developing field and organizing notes on far-flung researchers.4
However, Jackson writes superbly well and conveys her information clearly. Whatever the roots of this meandering, it does not detract from the overall coherence of her narrative. That is at once a fearful and a hopeful tale, lamenting our distraction and our minimal family lives as the harbingers of a new dark age, while revealing promising new understanding. But that understanding is still fledging, so her most valuable contribution may be her assessment of the damage that we have done to stable human relationships, and perhaps to our very humanity.
"So what stories are we weaving as we look to the machine to comfort and transform us—indeed, to be a part of us? Within this messy convergence, we are on the brink of redefining humanity, but in ways that ultimately may impoverish us. In a distracted time, our virtual, split-screen, and nomadic lives nurture diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. We begin to forget how to pay attention to one another deeply and begin to attend more to fallacy and artifice. Trust, depth of thought, and finally a certain spirit of humanity begin to be lost. Such changes are harbingers of a wildly inventive, marvelously technological dark age." – Page 206 |
The book has a set of endnotes for each chapter. It is printed in the same font size as the main text, and includes URLs as well as print sources. (A note says the URLs are current as of October 2007.) A very complete index, also in standard font size, follows the endnotes. Though it is not easy to read, the book is well worth reading. But I would not rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.