Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

By: Maggie Jackson  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.0 out of 5

We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at online headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never before, but we communicate even with our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur with electronic interruptions and a lack of focus.

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing--attention. Attention is the key to recapturing our ability to reconnect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world that isn't going to slow down or get simpler. Attention can keep us grounded and focused--not diffused and fragmented.

Distracted offers the cutting-edge solutions we need to cure--not just live with--an epidemic of inattention. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse--in bed? At a time when we can contact millions of people worldwide, why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it?

Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses, skimming, McThinking, and mistrust.

Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity, and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. She investigates the science of attention--describing some of the exciting new scientific research that shows how attention skills can be nurtured.

Taking us beyond Blink, Faster, and CrazyBusy, Distraction is unique. It's simultaneously an original exposé of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of postmodern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society.

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Out of Touch With Reality - "During a two-week stay in Norway, my daughter, then aged thirteen, called home one day by cell phone from a mountaintop. My husband thought at first she'd been hurt, but she simply wanted him to resolve a midhike teen debate about some Beatles' lyrics."

For me, this passage pretty well sums up the worldview of author Maggie Jackson as expressed through her recent book, Distracted: the Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. The book is filled with anecdotes, several of them personal, about people who blithely jet-set around the country and the world on a whim: a woman who flies to Italy for the weekend to run in a marathon with a friend from London; college professors meeting for lunch having just returned from international conferences; a group of friends who fly to Maine for a "weekend of restaurant hopping"; or 500-mile day trips to "do lunch."

The 500-mile lunch journey was one of the author's excursions. She used it to illustrate how blasé she claims our culture has become about travel; when she mentioned to persons she encountered that she was traveling 500 miles to meet for lunch, she claims she received no response from the cab drivers or ticket agents with whom she shared this information. Jackson interprets this as indicative of a culture in which long journeys have become commonplace.

As a commonplace nobody myself, I would interpret the silence with which Jackson was met differently. Some people have to work for a living. I'm sure the cab driver put in at least 500 miles that day. The difference is, he was working, covering the same airport or train station loop again and again, day after day, barely making enough of a salary to pay his bills and keep a roof over his head. A 500-mile day trip to meet for lunch is not an option in his world. The cab driver had two options for responding to the perky gloating of Ms. Jackson: ignore her, or punch her in the face.

Jackson seems to think that America, or at least the America that is the audience for her book, is a world of "doing lunch" and trips to Europe; a life of academe for the professionally accomplished and casual first-date sex for young cyber-savvy adults. It would be difficult to count which she references more, airport lobbies or trips to MIT. In her world, all young people are enrolled in college and all adults are connoisseurs of fine cheeses (which, of course, they make special trips to purchase and consume in the country of origin).

Overwhelmed by the trappings of the author's world, I lost focus on the gist of her argument. Indeed, beyond what she states in her title, I don't feel Jackson made an effective effort to restate or clarify her position; nor did she, in her rambling, anecdotal travelogue, present a convincing case for her argument. Dark age or not, jetting to Italy to run a marathon, spending a spur-of-the-moment weekend restaurant-hopping in Maine, and meeting hot, willing chicks over the internet, while a bit decadent, hardly sounds like a society on the brink of collapse. It requires a fair amount of orderliness to keep both airlines and internet dating sites running. We're still a long way from a grim, Pythonesque "bring out your dead" scenario.

The book includes heavily documented endnotes. A digression into the history of the fork as an eating utensil was interesting. Overall, however, I found the book alienating. Jackson is not writing about my world. I see, too, that I am the first person to borrow Distracted in the two years the book has been on the shelves in the Hawaii State Library System, which suggests that the all-encompassing "we" she uses throughout her text is more than a little myopic in scope.

Distracted: the Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008) by Maggie Jackson.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Distracted: So so, but maybe - I too have observed and been interested in phenomenon of a historical decrease in attention in our culture. I read this book to gain a better understanding of the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, as well as, further verification that the observation is accurate.

I found that the development of the thesis in this book a tad lacking. The general method was to make a claim and then to elaborate on the claim using selected scientific studies, anecdotes, and literature. This elaboration ostensibly was provided as evidence for veracity of the claim. On this count, using scientific criteria, the method was lacking. Also, the variations on the theme were a bit to difficult to integrate into a whole. I fear the author may have been DISTRACTED.

Considering that criticism, there were some windows of enlightenment in the work. I think this book might be valuable for those with a keen interest in this issue. For those with a passing interest, consider your time investment carefully and if you choose to invest, consider the evidence presented carefully.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
A Culture of Conscious Clutter; or a Conscious Culture of Clutter? - This author delves into those aspect of our society that has become a faceless techno-bureaucracy run by electronic gadgetry: a virtual culture of distraction, mindless inattentiveness and a purposefully devised culture of mental clutter. Mindless clutter has slowly become the norm replacing deep thinking, creativity, problem-solving and cohesive personal relationships between people. And here she tells us how we came to this state and what to do about it.

On the question of how we came to it, the author suggests that we came to this state of existence both by mistaking "technocratic ability to manipulate gadgetry" with engaging in creativity and knowledge acquisition. But also it came about by a subtle change in the way we reckon time, distance and space, brought on mostly by an over dependence on electronic gadgetry, by the speed in communication, and on the way those in our culture move about the globe: We no longer "mark time," we control and layer it.

The value we used to place on reflection and in cogitation has been replaced by a value on "time-splitting" multi-tasking and the layering of time. As a result, we have become a fragmented culture of split focus and anemic attention spans. Today, even though we are a truly global community, socialization is held together by the internet, cell phone texting, email, iPhones and iPods, CNN, TV ads, infomercials, video gaming, and "virtual", everything else.

As Marshall McLuan told us four decades ago, these things alter our reality in fundamental ways, including in the way we relate to each other. In short, our relationship to time and space has changed radically. Our ability to explore so many false alternative realities at the same time, has caused a complete breakdown in our ability to focus and concentrate on the one reality that is important: the reality of learned experiences and the personal awareness that goes with it. We have become an AHD society. Toleration of a high level of background noise and fragmentation have become the new norm. We have learned to mistake manipulating electronic gadgetry with knowledge acquisition and creativity. We have become a culture of scanners and skimmers: broader but not very deep or much wiser. Also we are losing the ability to engage in the process of executive attention management, an operation of the pre-frontal cortex that allows us to create and interpret knowledge. Those who lack it, become technocratic-busy bodies, who may move around quickly as they multi-task, but retain less and less real and usable content and knowledge. They become shallow rather than deep learners.

On the question of what to do about it, the first job of the socialization, process, according to the author, is to learn how to share focus and objects of attention. This process is critical to becoming social. Focus and attention are the indispensable bridges to socialization. The author's statistics show that families that live on TV have 25% less interaction within the family, especially between children and parents. Connectivity may be up, but social cohesion is way down. Ms. Jackson suggests that increased attention fuels deep thought as well as deeper more coherent social interactions. According to her, we need to change from a value system that rewards shallow manipulation to one that starts raising "attention athletes." We need more boredom in our lives, and more mental down time to free us from "mind clutter," and to free us up for creative thinking and problem solving. We need to inspire more young people to become citizens who value exercise of their minds over the ability to text-message while driving or rushing to the next meeting. Strengthening ones attention span is self-reinforcing and increases awareness across the board. We want our young people to engage in more memory and detective games (all of which empower awareness), and engaged less in TV watching, texting and emailing. We should de-clutter our environment, beginning with our public spaces: reduce TV monitors, PA systems. And in the home, we should turn the TV off and again begin to stop living by the clock and go back to living by "event based time." And finally, we need to become role models for attention by giving attention to others.


I was disappointed that the book did not address how deceased attention spans and increased clutter is being driven by our corporate masters who sell us useless products and otherwise benefit from having an electorate that no longer reads books or has the ability to attend to anything beyond a political "sound bite." It is no accident that a culture of clutter and short attention spans is the perfect environment for demagoguery and corruption, which is pretty much where we are today. We are a conscious culture of clutter, in part because it serves the anti-democratic designs of those who have a strangle hold on the American political economy. Three Stars

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Pseudo-Intellectual Diarrhea - The premise of this book is that the way we live is eroding our capacity for sustained, perceptive attention. Multi-tasking and a constant state of motion create a sense that we can barely keep our heads above water. Not surprisingly, U.S. 15-year-olds rank 24th of 29 developed countries on a test of problem-solving skills; they often lack the critical thinking skills that are the bedrock of an informed citizenry. The author then warns that our inability to focus heralds an impending Dark Age characterized by a decline of civilization.

Author Jackson raises good points. The problem with "Distracted" is that it characterizes the very behavior author Jackson is concerned about through an overly detailed attempt to provide detailed intellectualization and observations of Americans flitting all over, including even coverage of those hopefully few who e-mail the dead, unable to break away.

Fortunately, the symptoms are much easier to summarize than Jackson's "Distracted." Simply observe the high proportion of drivers cell-phoning or distracted talking to a passenger/child. Or, listen (you really have no choice) to the passenger next to you on a plane prior to departure - talking intently on the phone, usually about nothing of import or playing 'phone-tag.' Then there's meeting about trivial topics, or dominated by trivia that run on and on. Or shoppers lacking the discipline to simplify life through lists and one-stop/once-a-week shopping. Another symptom - the evening news rambles on and on with superficial coverage of multiple topics, ending up offering nothing of value. My favorite - two people sitting at lunch, one staring at his/her food while the other rambles on interminably on their cell-phone.

Solutions are simple - adopt a Pareto focus (20% of topics have 80% of the importance - delegate or ignore the rest) that begins with first steps or root causes, use agendas or 'to-do' lists, set timelines (especially for meetings) and deadlines, and have enough respect for your fellow-man to devote full attention to driving or shut-up when in close quarters (eg. an airplane). In other words, 'don't sweat the small stuff,' enjoy the flowers or other scenery, take time to think about key issues instead of just running your mouth all-day long repeating things not worth talking about or that you haven't really thought about. Read - a lot of non-fiction, on both sides of major local, national and global issues. When writing, stick to the key points by starting with an outline, if necessary.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Distracted by Boredom - This is an academic approach to a current problem of too much distraction in our lives. So much, we are running risks of overloading or making mistakes if we are not careful. Concentration and attention is being replaced by distraction. The book would be more readable if it were written in a less academic and meandering manner. I had a difficult time staying with the subject, as so many interjections and quotes were given from various sources that sounded like a classroom lecture. Bottom line: this book could have been a lot shorter and too the point but for those looking to wander into various supportive arguments and sources it will be for you.

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