Multitasking: Practice Makes—Oh, a New Text!
I’d like to propose a slogan for our country’s über-preoccupied population of multitaskers: I’m not as distracted as you think I—salad.
Contrary to my editor’s protests, this is not the nonsensical beginning of "Jabberwocky 2.0." And don’t think for a second that it’s an extreme position. I have actually heard people say things like this. In fact, I’ve probably said them myself—but I’m too busy to remember for sure.
Many Americans I’ve talked to lately can’t string even simple sentences together without being interrupted by a competing thought or an external distraction. Why? Well, it’s often because BlackBerries, Wi-Fi, iPhones, iPods, e-mail, GPS devices, DS consoles and who knows what else are beeping us away from concentrating on virtually anything for more than a few seconds at a time. And when we do have a quiet moment, we quickly mask it with more beeping or browsing because nowadays few of us know what to do with ourselves when our brains aren’t being overstimulated.
Shhhhhh!
This phenomenon and its effects first became clear to me when I started graduate school a few years ago.
I was at least 10 years older than most of my fellow students—which is to say that I felt fossil-like. And something even more momentous than the massive workload floored me: Socializing was different from when I’d gotten my bachelor’s degree in the early 1990s. Though bonding with Gen Y wasn’t impossible, it was definitely a new playing field.
When I was an undergrad, my friends and I sat around and took turns talking and listening. Our discussions were long, leisurely and rarely broken up unless an RA hissed, "Lights out, ladies" or we got too loud, which was more common. (I hate to be shushed to this day.) But when I noshed or chilled with my new, younger classmates, our gatherings felt—and I’ve dug deep to find the right words for this—positively frenetic. The technology these "kids" used made a difference in their concentration and discourse.
My generation—it psychologically pains me to write that—grew up sans laptops, cell phones and 8,000 options for everything. iTunes was iUnheard-Of. E-mail was a burgeoning novelty and social networking an impossibility. But when I crept back into the somewhat disjointed and decidedly more modern twentysomething world, conversation predators were routinely personal DVD players, handheld game consoles, blogs and chat rooms. (Now you can add YouTube, Facebook, texting, etc.)
I didn’t know how to compete—and competition was categorically what trying to speak in this brave new world felt like.
Multimedia Mayhem
I’m not saying that this group and younger people in general don’t communicate. They do. But few would disagree that they do it differently than previous generations. And as technology has become ubiquitous and the multitasking frenzy a new, overarching "normal" that transcends age groups, most of us communicate somewhat differently now. Juggling things—whether job responsibilities, conversations, media, relationships, hobbies, errands—is just a given today. The word multitasking is even something employers want to see on résumés.
So here’s what my old-school psyche wants to know: Are we more effective because we’re doing more than one task at a time?
I’m not the only one who wonders. A recent Stanford University study demonstrated that the people who multitask the most never do it well because they’re more easily distracted by irrelevant information. Dr. Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor involved in the research, says, "The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media." Common theories have presumed that those who multitask the most frequently are the best at it via the "practice makes perfect" principle. But Nass says, "They’re worse. They’re much worse. They couldn’t ignore stuff that doesn’t matter. They love stuff that doesn’t matter."
A friend of mine who is now in her late forties used to work at the corporate headquarters of a hip, international company in Seattle. She’s told me about how its employees, many of them younger, casually held business meetings while sprawled on sofas in hallways instead of at meeting tables in conference rooms. They chose smartphones in lieu of pens and paper. They often talked over one another in brief, blurted-out sentences and covered multiple topics simultaneously, all while doing at least one other—and often unrelated—thing. She noticed that many of these highly intelligent people did not comprehend or act upon what was discussed nearly as well as they thought they did. But since many had never known anything but hyperkinetic bustle, they didn’t realize it.
She never told them what she’d observed—she wanted to keep paying her mortgage and they wouldn’t have believed her anyway—but she saw inefficiency that could have been avoided if there’d been more clarity and less multitasking.
When Simultaneous Isn’t
Prof. Nass has a potentially frightening observation to consider: "The people who multitask all the time think very differently than those who don’t. … I tend to think that things like filtering are really important to thinking. If we are training a generation not to do that, I suspect that’s a really bad thing."
Dr. David W. Goodman, director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland, concurs. "[Multitaskers are] being flooded with too much information and [they] can’t selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important. It only takes a fraction of a second for you to take your eyes off the road and miss the guy making a right-hand turn into your lane."
Dr. Jordan Grafman, chief neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, says of multitasking, "You’re doing more than one thing, but you’re ordering them and deciding which one to do at any one time." In other words, we’re not doing anything simultaneously, as we think we are. Our prefrontal cortex—the brain’s "planning center"—is merely toggling back and forth between tasks.
And it’s not doing it very efficiently, either, it seems.
In a world that requires spending continual partial attention to a slew of rapidly changing ideas, thoughts and things, the brain never gets a chance to rest or truly contemplate what it’s processing. So by our taking on so many things simultaneously, are we creating a society that will soon be unable to concentrate on and comprehend any one thing deeply? Researchers say "maybe so." Dr. Nass adds that companies requiring employees to constantly stay connected through e-mail "may be hurting" their "entire workforce."
But for me this issue goes far beyond workplace productivity. Because its tendrils extend into more personal—and sacred—areas. How is multitasking affecting our relationships with the people we care about most? How is it affecting our relationships with God? How is it affecting my relationship with myself?
About 2,000 years ago, a now-famous slave named Publilius Syrus said, "To do two things at once is to do neither." I can’t imagine what he would think about us doing six things at once—while updating Facebook pages and watching a viral video, too.