The Chicago Sun Times explored the idea that we are overwhelmed with data and cognitively suffering from multitasking in an interesting piece this week: http://tinyurl.com/24ajsp. And for once, the journalist actually reported what I said accurately. The angle taken seems to be that too much digital information use is in danger of dumbing us down and while that plays well as a story, the various people interviewed don’t actually offer much support for this. The real point is that humans are limited information processors (‘skinny pipes’ rather than broadband, as my colleague Randolph Bias likes to say) and multitasking can carry a cost.
V.M Daniel Regents Professor of Information
I’m wryly amused by the fact that the news article appears on a webpage which contains:
– drop-down select for communities
– drop-down select for other publications
– temperature information, with links to weather/traffic bulletins
– a search box
– three picture adverts
– five Google text ads
– a left sidenav with 50 items on it
– 11 tabs left of that (replicating some items)
– three (changing) video links, with thumbnails
– five top story links
– six blogger links
– an invitation to bookmark the page
And that’s before you get to the actual article, where an attention-grabbing box-out disrupts your reading as soon as you get to the end of the second paragraph.
I find that a big problem with reading online is the constant temptation of ‘instant information gratification’ — it used to be that if I found myself thinking “What does that mean?” or “How does this new idea relate to that half-remembered idea?” while reading, I’d make a note and go and look it up later. Now Google-happy fingers are on the case before I’ve had time to think, so I get to the word “multitasking” and wonder how good the analogy really is with the way computers multitask, which leads me into a Wikipedia article, and then on coming back to the article the ‘survival tips’ remind me that I saw something very similar on 43 folders a couple of months ago, but I can’t find it on their site, so I try googling for various remembered keywords, and halfway through something else distracts me… but that’s okay, the article is still open in a browser tab, so I’ll come back to it later. (By the end of a day I usually have about 50 tabs open.)
I’ll be interested to read more about research in this area, though… on paper, in a quiet room with no internet connection.