Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Lisa Greim

My kids do homework and forget to hand it in. This, to me, is inexcusable. In my day, when we blew schoolwork off, we blew it off properly, flagged down a pal with a car, turned the radio all the way up and went to Dairy Queen for a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight. To complete an assignment and then add it to the compost pile in your backpack seems a waste by my ancient standards of slacking.

Photo by carbonNYC via Flickr.com, CC 2.0

But then, we had fewer things to do instead of homework: three channels of TV and a handful of radio stations. Teens shared one phone with everybody in the house and got the hairy eyeball from parents if we yakked too long. Hanging out was done in person; messages arrived via notebook paper folded into tiny squares and passed behind the teacher’s back. Games came on boards or in cards. You could only play Scrabble for so long before your math homework looked interesting by comparison.

The other night my son was on his bed with Monty Python sketches from YouTube playing on his laptop, iPod earbuds installed, Nintendo DS in one hand running Pokemon Platinum, and the pencil with which he was allegedly writing down algebra problems in the other. My daughter was reading her history textbook on the couch downstairs while watching “Phineas and Ferb.”

Not only do my kids forget to hand things in, I hear from parents of their friends that smart kids are failing their favorite subjects because they’re not doing the work. Then teachers forget to grade things and parents forget to check the online gradebook, or don’t see the email from the teacher because it’s buried in their inboxes with the other 20,000 things they’re either doing or forgetting to do.

Right now I have nine applications running on my MacBook, not counting the Finder. Eight mail windows are open, plus 11 tabs in Firefox alone. Papers, sticky notes and two phones are spread across my desk, I can hear two conversations and Taj Mahal is playing on the Sonos. Who am I to talk?

It’s not just multitasking, it’s overtasking. It is an epidemic, and it’s not limited to kids.

New York Times science columnist John Tierney devoted his May 5 column to the science of concentration. “Is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?” he writes.

Readers think not. The comment threads read like a collective cry for help – why am I so frazzled and yet unable to get anything done?

Winifred Gallagher, author of “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” (Penguin, 2009), says it takes conscious effort to override the brain’s impulse to pay attention to the newest, shiniest object. She took up the subject after a cancer episode, taking her text from William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She carries earplugs to create her own “stimulus shelter” from intrusive sounds, and advocates working on your most important task for the first 90 minutes of your day. Then take a break for email, phone calls or coffee, because it takes your brain 20 minutes to reboot after an interruption.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

The antidotes suggested by commenters ranged from techno music and the “Getting Things Done” method to Ritalin or getting your thyroid checked. Each person’s brain is wired uniquely, so experiment with different ways of working until you find one that lets you tune out everything but the task at hand.

I hope to get a chance to work on that next week sometime.

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