Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Is hyper-busyness a form of sloth? It seems beyond paradoxical to consider our efficient, connected, mobile days even remotely… lazy. But both medieval philosophers and early Buddhist practitioners warned of restlessness and busyness as slothful, because amidst such hyper-ness we tend to avoid what’s deep and important.
Think about it. Madly ticking items off our agenda, we easily avoid depth of thought, the discomfort of ambiguity, or the type of thought-experiments that Einstein undertook. Look around – isn’t our addiction to gadgets perhaps a form of avoidance not only to what’s concretely going on around us, but to the deeper bigger issues going on around us?
Taming busyness, we can begin to confront … the blank page. Or we can turn and face our fears, rather than fleeing once again at the sight of them. I’m not advocating navel-gazing, or wallowing in grief or thought without action. But since avoidance of pain, discomfort, difficulty seems to be a specialty of our times, I do believe that a little confrontation with the deeper issues is medicine we could all use.
Here are some thoughts on the subject by the German poet Rilke, as he advises a young protege to be patient with a sad time in his life.
“Do consider whether these great sorrows might not have passed through your very center? Whether much inside you has not been transformed, whether you did not change in some part of your being during those periods of sorrow?”
He goes on to say that moments of sorrow perhaps should be welcomed, “For those are the moments when something new centers into us, something unfamiliar; our feelings grow more out of shy diffidence; everything in us pulls back, a stillness descends and the new that no one knows stands mutely amidst all this.”
Those are words that I wished I’d been able to call forth when, in a recent time of deep sorrow, I was so quickly advised to get on pills or find a shrink. All well-meaning advice. But I couldn’t help thinking that this advice came from a wish to muffle or abolish my pain, rather than an acceptance of my right to listen within, and hear out my pain, and grow stronger as a result.
Sometimes when others are grieving, the best thing we can do is accept their right to be in pain. Instead of saying so quickly, “Get over it. Move on. Get fixed.”

“Take some time to just be human, off-line.” Those were the parting words of musician Pete Wentz – 2 million Twitter followers! – at the close of last Thursday’s CNN Dialogue, a community discussion at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The topic: Social Media: The Good, the Bad and the Surprising. My fellow panelists were Wentz, comedian Baratunde Thurston, and TwitChange founder Shaun King, plus the moderator, CNN anchor Don Lemon, all sharp, thoughtful and wholly steeped in the online world. There was so much texting, tweeting and continuous partial attention going on backstage before the talk that I felt too sheepish to pull out work on a mere piece of paper, or … sit and daydream.

When the Dialogue began, there was a fair bit of oohing and aahing at the whiz-bang beauty of it all – we can change the world, I’m in touch with everybody, always, we’re all happier now. But to my delight, there was candor too, and realism, underscoring my view that the level of discussion around technology is maturing, albeit slowly.

We talked about proliferating weak ties, and their limits. In job hunts, weak ties – our acquaintances, friends of friends etc. – can provide information, but little more. Socially, our online friendships strain the definition of the word; a third of Facebook “friends” are strangers or people with whom we have dormant relations. And yet, as Shaun pointed out, he sometimes feels closer to an online stranger-turned-friend across the country than he does to his own family. Social media is powerfully connective.

What’s the impact on strong ties? I pointed out the corrosive nature of punctured presence. When we’re all in the same room, are we having a rich, textured conversation or are we sated by disjointed, fragmented talk? One eye on the gadget, one eye on our flesh-and-blood friend or colleague, we divide ourselves in pieces. The rise of the “blackberry orphan” says a lot. I used to hide my parent’s cigarettes, now kids hide their mom’s pda – or just stay glued to their own.

Shaun told of a “humiliating” moment when his elderly neighbor knocked on his door – her husband had just died – and Shaun couldn’t think of his name. We are islands, despite all our hyper-connectivity, Baratunde said. “Nobody cares about you!,” he said, half-jokingly – and the audience clapped. Shaun worried about the effect of living virtually on the social skills of his four children. Pete told of the many fans who approach him, knowing so little of his music, but expecting a piece of him.

One last scene from the evening: an English major in a jacket and tie asked about the “attachment” people have for their gadgets. His friends tremble if their batteries die, he said. “I never let my batteries die,” said Shaun, to laughter. I talked about the digital detox – a 24-hour mandatory detox from media – that I witnessed at the U.Maryland – and the angst so many students felt when the plug was pulled. Do we have time to listen to the depths of our inner selves anymore?

In witnessing such extraordinary connectivity throbbing around me, I sensed a paradox – a time of heady excitement and creeping unease, of deepening insecurity and the thrill of the hunt. Being steeped in the Net entails keeping up, keeping up, with it all. But are we better people as a result? I agree with Pete: we need to step back, pause and remind ourselves more often simply to be human.

The Supreme Court struck down a California law barring the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, citing freedom of speech. Depictions of violence, one justice noted, aren’t subject to government regulation. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” wrote Justice Scalia. The ruling, of course, has video game makers cheering.

Perhaps these games should be openly for sale, and parents should have the responsibility for monitoring kids’ use. But what’s most deeply disturbing to me is the level of discussion that surrounded the news, and even the ruling. Two veins of illogic seem to dominate:

-       “One media is the same as another.” In playing violent video games, modern youth are often spending considerable amounts of time virtually participating in intense, fast-paced violence. That’s a different form of absorption than is exercised when merely listening to or reading an age-old fairy tale. Even if children act out violence in play, the content won’t (I hope) resemble the realism of these games. True, we don’t yet know all the effects of gaming, but equating one media with another isn’t the right way to understand either.

-       “The jury is out – we don’t know whether they do harm.” Study after study shows that video games can lead children to become immune to the horror of violence, to imitate violence, and show more aggressive behavior after being exposed to media violence, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In an op-ed today, one researcher ridiculed the idea that these games might have an effect on young children, arguing that kids know that exhortations to shoot and kill are “fake.” Just because a child may know that a game is fantasy doesn’t mean they won’t be influenced by its content. Another collapsed bit of logic.

My personal bottom line: would I allow my child to spend time on these games? Not a chance.

Five influential authors who have written books on aspects of information overload will come together for the first time in a “virtual literary salon” produced by IORG—the Information Overload Research Group.  The event takes place on June 27, 2011, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EDT.

This is the first time that all five authors—Dave Crenshaw (author of The Myth of Multitasking), Daniel Forrester (author of Consider), Maggie Jackson (author of Distracted), William Powers (author ofHamlet’s BlackBerry), and Jonathan Spira (author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization)—will appear on the same panel.

Each author will discuss two questions—why they wrote their book, and the issues and solutions they consider most relevant.

“The information overload problem has been kept below the radar by denial and misunderstanding for years,” says Nathan Zeldes, president of IORG. “It’s encouraging to see that it is now getting this level of exposure. The participation of these insightful authors in IORG’s efforts to raise awareness and encourage remedial action is most welcome—and I look forward to hearing what they have to say.”

Jonathan Spira, who is also a director and co-founder of the Information Overload Research Group, will moderate the panel.  “The five of us have much in common,” he says.  “We’ve all written books on some facet of information overload, and this is an opportunity for us to do two things:  Give a mini TED-style talk for eight minutes, and then interact with each other and the people who have joined us by phone.  We’re excited about the insights that will come out of this.”

Registration is free; donations are welcome. Details regarding how to dial in to the call will be emailed to you a few days before the event.

Author biographies:

Dave Crenshaw, The Myth of Multitasking (DaveCrenshaw.com)—Crenshaw has appeared in TIME magazine, Forbes, the Washington Post, SIRIUS XM Radio, and BBC News. His first book, The Myth of Multitasking: How ‘Doing It All’ Gets Nothing Done, has been published in six languages and is a time-management best seller.  He is president of the International Association of Productivity Coaches and has helped thousands of clients worldwide. Dave will discuss the concepts behind his book and share some practical strategies he gives his CEO coaching clients to find more time and focus in their workday.

Daniel Forrester, Consider (www.DanielForrester.com / @dpforrester)—For the past 15 years as author and consultant (he’s a director and executive with Sapient Government Services), Forrester has addressed the complexities facing management in coping with the increasing role of government and technology as unprecedented change agents. His latest book, Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization,” argues that technology’s tsunami of information is crowding out time for reflective thinking, a mental space that leads to failures more than to successes. Forrester will focus on what it means to be reflective as a leader or part of a team when shaping big ideas and making big decisions.  He will share examples from his book, including the thinking habits of leaders like Gen. David Petraeus and the think-time routines of companies like Whirlpool and Google.

Maggie Jackson, Distracted (Maggie-Jackson.com)—Jackson is an award-winning columnist and author. Her acclaimed book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, sparked a global conversation on the costs of fragmenting our attention. A longtime Boston Globe contributing columnist, Jackson is also a senior fellow at the Center for Work-Life Policy, and a sought-after speaker around the globe. Drawing from cutting-edge science, Jackson will give a primer on the enigma of attention—our most crucial human capacity. She also will share three essential strategies for recapturing the power of attention in people and organizations.

William Powers, Hamlet’s BlackBerry (WilliamPowers.com / @HamletsBB)—Powers is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, he is a two-time winner of the National Press Club’s Rowse Award for best American media commentary. Powers will talk about the core message of Hamlet’s BlackBerry—the solution to overload involves changing how we THINK about our digital devices. Powers says that digital connectedness serves us best when it’s balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness (i.e., time away from the screen).

Jonathan Spira, Overload! (www.OverloadStories.com)—Spira is CEO and chief analyst of Basex, a research firm focusing on issues companies face as they navigate the knowledge economy. His new book, Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization is the culmination of more than 10 years of research with some of the world’s top companies (which has established that information overload in all its forms costs the U.S. economy $1 trillion per year). Drawing on that research, Spira will offer tips and strategies on how to deal with the dizzying excess of information.

Ever since I lived in Japan for a few years in my 20s, I have been fascinated by that country’s Living National Treasures, Ningen Kokuho. They are extraordinary craftsmen or performers honored by the government for preserving the country’s traditional arts, from swordmaking to Kabuki theater. But these artists aren’t just looking backwards or preserving the status quo. They embody a national aesthetic that values hard work for the common good and a deep spiritual respect for the act of creativity. They “insist that even the most perfect technique will fail unless it springs from deep feeling,” write Sheila Hamanaka and Ayano Ohmi in their book on the institution, In Search of the Spirit.

Recently, I had two encounters with Americans who seem to me to be national treasures of our own land, given their gentle, tenacious, courageous efforts to change the world. Here are a few thoughts on Donald Keene, and, in my next blog, on Mary Catherine Bateson.

At the kind invitation of my friend Michiko Iwahara, I heard the eminent Columbia University scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene speak last week at the Japan Society, in what was likely his last public US talk before moving to Japan and assuming Japanese citizenship. He is a spry 89-year-old with a steeltrap memory and an endearing humility spiced by candor. He stood indefatigably at the post-talk reception, surrounded by a throng of young students. Apparently, he still works seven days a week.

Mostly, he talked informally about his life: the fortuitous accidents of befriending a Chinese student and then being invited to study Japanese; his WWII work translating blood-stained diaries saved from the bodies of Japanese soldiers; his ties to Columbia, where he studied and taught for 73 years; and his deep love of Japanese literature, which he introduced to the world. Despite his Western background, Keene never felt anything but a deep immediate connection to Japan’s literature. No “us” vs “them” sentiment colored his views, he said.  He seemed to have become at one with the works that he translated or critiqued.

Two highlights of the evening for me:

Keene told of showing up for one of his first classes in Japanese studies at Columbia in the late 1930s, only to find that he was the only student. That’s okay, professor Ryusaku Tsunoda said, “One is enough.” In an age of rabid friending and following, that’s a conviction to consider. If we teach or love well, one is enough. In that classroom so long ago, who was the one who sat ready to learn? Donald Keene, who would go on to bring Japan’s literature to the world’s attention. And who was the one so willing to give his all to a single pupil? Tsunoda, the father of Japanese studies at Columbia, and a lifelong mentor to Keene.

This summer, Keene will be taking Japanese citizenship and moving permanently to Japan, a decision he made last winter while hospitalized with a serious illness. His choice comes as many foreigners are leaving Japan in the wake of the recent disasters. But the tragedies made Keene all the more determined to make the move, in part to show solidarity for Japan’s people.

At the Japan Society, Keene recalled that many Japanese people have told him that his decision has given them courage. He spoke in response to the evening’s last question, from Reuters Television correspondent and former Keene student Fred Katayama. If I can give someone courage, that’s a good thing, Keene said. His simple, remarkable words lingered in silence for a moment, before the audience stood to applaud him.

One is enough.

Next week: A talk with Mary Catherine Bateson on the gift of our longer lives.

Information overload is a problem that’s hard to pick apart. Haven’t we been deluged with information for hundreds of years? How can we turn down the data spigot without losing out on opportunities? Is anybody thinking creatively on this front?

A new book, Overload! How Too Much Information if Hazardous to Your Organization, by Jonathan Spira valiantly grapples with these issues. Spira is chief executive of the research firm Basex, and he’s been a passionate crusader against such deluge through his surveys and writings. Sometimes, Spira’s book itself slips into overload mode; a reader doesn’t need quite so much convincing that the problem is real. But get past the fretting and the many barometers of overload, and the book has numerous eye-opening moments – and practical suggestions.

Spira is at his best, for instance, when tackling email. He was one of the first to see its dangers. Like rabbits overrunning Australia, email breeds astronomically, especially through thoughtless “reply all” responses and equally thoughtless over-lengthy content. Spira fights back by offering a brief preface of his message at the top of an email, a tactic called “Bottom Line Up Front” that Spira borrowed from a former military officer. (Col. Peter Marksteiner – Does Twitter Match The Mission?) Such small, elegant solutions are crucial for handling overload.

It seems to me that the issue overall boils down to a two-part challenge.

First, quality and quantity.  In our daily life, humans endlessly endeavor to parse out the relevant from volumes of information hitting us physically and cognitively. Overload becomes an issue when the pace and volume of data exceeds our biological ability to sift and sort it. The result? Stress, paralyzed decision-making, and shallow thought, as Spira notes.

Consider online searching – a time when the human should take charge, sculpting a question designed to pull relevant data from the machine. Instead, people don’t take the time to formulate a careful query, and so are deluged with trivia. Their mistake, it seems to me, is to hope that the machine will do all the thinking.Instead, we need the tenacity to get past the first page of mostly paid results and the first phase of frustration and confusion endemic to research. We need to ask ourselves, are we thinking and reflecting throughout our data-driven day?

Spira’s research has found that knowledge workers spend just 5 percent of their days on thought and reflection, down from 12 percent of the day in 2008. That slippage is the true key to fighting overload, I believe. That’s why reflection – our most crucial form of perspective-taking – is the subject of my next book.

Stay tuned!

Book Note: What am I reading right now? Lastingness: The Art of Old Age by Nicholas Delbanco, a look at how creators stay productive in their later years.

Last week, theater critic Terry Teachout at the Wall Street Journal wrote a column, “Get to the Good Part” – arguing that shorter attention spans would lead to more concise art. I wrote a letter in reply.

Here’s the full letter, which was cut down a bit on the paper:

Terry Teachout is mistaken. Shortened attention spans have nothing to do with the production of succinct, well-conceived, well-paced entertainment.

Ask any neuroscientist or psychologist – or writer. If you are attention-deficient, you’re more likely to fall prey to distraction and the tangential. You’re more impulsive and less able to plan ahead. You tend to hopscotch through life, and often are unable to follow the trail of a thought or idea, pin it down and painstakingly turn that thought into a creative breakthrough. As a creator or critic or spectator of the arts, you’re too often stuck on the surface of life – if you have too short an attention span.

Teachout rightly advocates for succinct, well-thought artworks. No one, in the past or in our era, wants wooden, dull entertainment or literature. Humans have always aspired to cut the fat from our creations, and tell stories so riveting that they stop time and grab others’ focus.

But it’s wrong to imply that anything quick and brief is smart, while anything slow and lengthy is dumb. Older sitcoms, classic plays, and discursive masterworks take time to imbibe and digest – and perhaps offer a depth and nuance that our adrenaline-infused, briefer forms of entertainment cannot. The point is, we need both  – and we especially need to be able to focus deeply in order to create and enjoy such slower, longer fare. Attention unlocks the door to the world beyond the fast and brief. It gives us the ability to get past digressions and superfluity.

Our impatient age seeks to cut to the chase, but in so doing, we too often miss out on the journey that is life and art. A deeper, longer attention span allows us the clarity to grasp the beauty of the fast and the slow, the brief and the long-lasting.

Long ago, I applied for a grant from a big, famous foundation to study technology’s impact on work-family, as it was called back then. I got a generous grant – but also a caution from the director that ‘technology doesn’t really have anything to do with work-family balance.’ How many times have I looked back and been amused by that assumption.

Fast forward to late 2010, when I spoke at an Emory University conference on “Imagining the Future of the Family”. It was an interesting gathering, and included anthropologists Chuck Darrah, Peter Stromberg, Mark Auslander, historian Stephanie Coontz and among others, and Miss Manners! And it was an honor to be the only journalist invited to present.

Here (belatedly) are my remarks, abbreviated just by a bit:

Let’s imagine the future. What will family togetherness look like in an increasingly technological age? And what are the trends today that will be the building blocks of family life tomorrow?

In the great tradition of EM Forster and HG Wells and William Gibson, I’d like to start considering these questions by offering a little bit of futuristic, science fiction.

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Picture an American family in the year 2035. It’s breakfast time on a Friday morning.

The mother, Eve, is swabbing her 8 –year-old son’s cheek, to get his cortisol reading. Although she can easily buy a digital machine to do the same work, Eve uses an old-fashioned “Stress Test” strip – she likes the retro feel.

Oops – it’s high today! Eve gives her son a sympathetic look. But he’s on his Blackberry, and listening to his iPod, so he doesn’t notice his mom’s concern.

It’s been a stressful week for Ben. The family’s robot dog, Zip, is in the shop for repairs, and Ben misses him terribly. Plus, Ben failed his weekly “focus” test in school. He’d rather do anything than sit and meditate. But that’s the lynchpin of the new mandatory attention curriculum. Latin is gone – focus is in.

Eve gives Ben a kiss on the head, and starts to hurry off to work. But her husband Rick walks into the kitchen, so she takes a minute to sync the weekend’s schedule with him.

“Do you want to invite your mother to dinner Sunday?” asks Eve.

The family has a new Skype-model dinner table. The end of the table is a screen that folds up, so that they can include a virtual guest at dinner. Grandma loves to be invited, although it’s hard to really include her in the conversation, given her touch of deafness and the slight camera lag.

Rick nods yes. They hold up their Blackberries – the machines kiss – and the invitation is sent — since the PDAs were on “listening capacity.” Rick then goes back to sifting his emails – he’s had 96 new ones since getting out of the shower. And he keeps one eye on the tv – which doubles as a microwave and a wall safe. That’s where the family keeps its precious collection of passwords. There are far too many for any family member to recall.

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Where are we? We’re at home with the Morgen family. And what’s the backdrop to their life? What are the dominant trends today that will likely affect family life in 2035?

First, DATA-STREAMS. Floods of information. The home is a porous place.

And a noisy place.

More than two thirds of children aged six and under live in homes where the tv is on most or all of the time. Often, no one’s watching. The steady hum of the tv is somehow comforting, especially at night. Why? According to Emory anthopologist Carol Worthman, ancient humans gathered together for safety and sociability in the evening. She speculates in her research on the evolution of sleep that the chatter of the tv may cue us to feel that people are around, so we are safe.

Today, the background tv, however, may undercut real time togetherness, according to research by Dan Anderson at UMass/Amherst. In homes with the tv on most of the time, parental-child interaction falls by 20 percent, and toddlers show less focus in their play.

The home is noisy in a second sense. Noise – as you know – is also a technical term meaning “Irregular fluctuations that accompany an electrical signal but are not part of it and tend to obscure it.” Think of the electrical signal as “family cohesion” and the irregular fluctuations – noise – as the multiple, media streams coming into the home.

Often, household members use media to collaborate. They play computer games together, play a match of Wii tennis, build a town in second life. A level of absorption and engagement can be constructed within the sphere of the technology. At times, media can serve as a post-modern hearth, a potential gathering point in the home.

But at the same time, media is often experienced individually – due to its portability and level of customization. Today, children are exposed to 7.38 hours of media, including music, each day. Three quarters have an iPod, up from 18 percent in 2004. Nearly 40 percent of children have a tv or DVD player in their car. More than 70 percent have a tv in their bedroom. These devices present as many opportunities for separation as for congregation.

Parental work-life spillover, meanwhile, keeps adults fused to their own relentless data-streams. A recent survey found that U.S. professionals spend half their workday receiving and managing information. Half said if information keeps increasing, they will reach a “breaking point.” Hyperbole? Perhaps. But expectations of accessibility keep ascending.

In a study of information supply and demand, University of Michigan media technology professor Russell Neuman recently estimated that sources of information have increased 2000 times since the 1960s. And most people he’s interviewed say they are happy with that abundance.

Yet these media “riches” are a pressure point for the family. They change the nature of presence in profound ways. Media is escaping from the box. It’s personal, portable and environmental. It’s both the landscape we inhabit and a biological prosthetic.

Technologists today speak in terms of push and pull media – depending on whether a data-point is requested by a client or streamed to the user. Email is pull, so is a Google search. TV ads are push; once you sign up, you keep getting a stream of messages – despite the mute button.

Perhaps another way to think about the media is in terms of whether it tends to push the family together – or pull the family apart. This is a tug of war that is important to watch.

Let’s return for a minute to our Morgen family.

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Eve returns home that Friday evening at 6 p.m. She calls out a hello, but no one answers. (Zip is in the shop, she remembers.) She is too exhausted to check the GPS on her son Ben, or that of her 12-year-old stepdaughter Liz, who’s coming for the weekend.

Instead, Eve heads to the “womb-room” – the only place in the house that is disconnected from the Net. The walls are screens that show virtual landscapes – she presses ocean, and is at a beach, listening to a seagull’s cry and the soothing rush of a wave. These womb-rooms are the most fashionable additions to homes these days.

Eve pulls out a print-out of the family’s weekend activities that she’d brought home from work. Ever since her therapist diagnosed “dimanchophobia” – that is, fear of an unstructured Sunday – Eve is careful to keep the family busy. Yet she and Rick also yearn for those few moments when the family is truly together, talking and having fun.  So she is keeping an eye out for a chance at bio-interactivity, what used to be called face time.

From the printout, she determines that the family will be in the same room for only 22 minutes all weekend. That’s during Sunday dinner. Instantly, she decides on a “black-out” meal – with a flip of a switch, she can regulate the connectivity of the family’s gadgets in any room or the whole house. A black-out shuts off all incoming texts, emails, and phone calls, although still allowing the Skype table to work.

Liz, the stepdaughter, will be upset that her “bf implant” – an open connection to her best friend – will be disrupted for a little while. But Eve will stand her ground. Togetherness is more than a text message, Eve firmly believes.

Moving into the kitchen to get a cup of tea, Eve sees a text from Ben. He’s upstairs, and messaging her: “I’m hungry. What’s for a snack?”

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Turn back to the present, and again, what are the trends now that will build family life in the future? Along with DATA, families are being shaped by SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY. This is another facet of the question of porosity.

As sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng writes, “Through each act of (in) accessibility, we establish or end, defend, challenge and/or change the nature of a given relationship.”

This is not new. But what’s new is the level of management that’s demanded in the digital age. Networks are broadened. We are awash in weak ties. And connectivity is instant, and potentially constant. This produces what Kenneth Gergen called the “relational self” or Barry Wellman calls “networked individualism.”  Consider, a quarter of teens check their Facebook pages 10 times a day. Family ties both profit from and are in enormous competition with these networks.

According to research from UCLA, children at day’s end don’t acknowledge a returning dad 40 percent of the time. And distraction is seen in one-third of couple reunions.

Does this matter? Yes. According to anthropologists, a moment of reunion is an acknowledgment of the other, a signal that you are someone. A greeting is a key opportunity for shared intimacy and one of few rituals shared by all societies.

Perhaps it’s natural that threshold moments today are optional. Instant connection allows for more constant togetherness between family members. Traveling parents now shared bedtime stories by Skype. Judges order virtual custody visits.

But if virtual relationships are available at the push of a button, why rush at day’s end to find about another’s day? Always-on connectivity may, as Naomi Baron argues, signal the end of anticipation

Secondly, when family members are together for those 22 minutes on Sunday, their own pulsing networks can puncture their physical presence. When we are in the same room together, attention is likely fragmented. We are multitasking each other, and as much research shows, we don’t do “dual-task” well.

The jury is still out on many of these questions. Half of parents spend some time each week using the Internet with other family members.One study found no differences between Internet users and non-users on how much family members shared ideas. On the other hand, families with multiple communications devices are less likely to eat dinner together. And high Internet use among teens is associated with worse relationships with parents and less family cohesion, even when personality is controlled for.

Families are scrambling to find time together – even in small doses – and they will continue to do so. But the “pull” of media is enormous, and coming together is increasingly a punctured, fragmented, brief experience. How families handle this challenge is of utmost importance to our society as a whole.

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In conclusion, I’d like to offer a caveat – and one or two last predictions.

It’s hard to predict the future, especially re technology. So often we underestimate or overestimate the impact of new devices on our culture.

In the late 19^th century, telephone companies fought the use of telephone for social purposes. Acting on assumptions from the telegraph age, viewed it as business instrument.

On other hand, we’ve heard predictions that painted gadgets as more powerful than they are. In 1909, one commentator wrote:  “Children’s minds are being poisoned and their morals are corrupted by movies.”

Why?

First, the bigger their place in our lives, the harder it is to objectify tech tools. They become “unseen,” or as Dewey said, recognized but not perceived.

Second, technology is a two-way street. It’s a negotiation, as Claude Fisher says. Not just an input. Our tools shape us, just as we invent and shape them to our purposes. Tech artifacts may function like myths, in that “they serve as rationalizing models for the cultures that produce them.”

So predictions are difficult.

BUT looking ahead is what humans are born to do. That’s what imagination and dreaming and planning are all about. Without these skills, our species wouldn’t survive. So I’ll hazard one last prediction.

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I believe we might, in another generation, see technology not in terms of tool use or even lifestyle, but as an environmental issue.

We might look back on the Industrial Age as a time marked by the erection of new and idealized boundaries between home and work.

We might see the early Digital Age – our time – as an era when we worked a bit too furiously to tear down the boundaries. And make our homes and family lives vibrant but porous.

And we might someday see the Middle Digital Age as a time of climate control. When families like the Morgans endeavor to create zones of focus – through womb rooms and blackout dinners – so they can enjoy a pocket of bio-interactivity.

In future, technology can’t be put back in the box. But families will, I cautiously predict, want to carve out room for togetherness.

Perhaps in future we won’t even talk about work-life balance. We’ll instead talk about balancing action and contemplation. Or juggling our humanity and our machinery. There may be new types of conflict and spillover and synergy.

All I know for sure is, we can’t get ahead of our biology.

Because when people come together physically – as we are – attention is just a starting point. After that, comes the difficult, complex, work of synchronicity and listening and empathy and understanding. And if those ideals are realized even in part, that’s when family connectivity really gets going. Face time is still – as MIT’s Sherry Turkle has observed – the gold standard of human relations.

Good news – our collective public discussions about technology may be maturing. I see evidence every day that we’re beginning to have nuanced, balanced discussions on distraction, overload and hyper-connectivity. Exhibit A: see the article in today’s NY Times, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price.”

As Carolyn Marvin wrote in her classic book When Old Technologies Were New, public conversations around new technologies are first dominated by the engineers and marketers who brought these inventions into being. In other words, the geeks rule. This occurred in the age of the telephone and light bulb, and it’s been true in recent decades. That’s one reason why I was determined in the 1990s to begin to write about the social impact of technology on humanity. Non-technologists deserve a place at the table as we shape our relationship with the Machine. I’m not a Luddite simply if I’m skeptical about technology.

To Matt Richtel’s good article, I’d add a couple of points. First, in different eras in history, societies prize specific types of attention. In the Industrial Age, people began to venerate rigid, unbending focus. “Pay attention” became the mantra, because humans needed to adapt to bureaucratic and mechanized ways of living and working in schools, offices and even at home. The life of the farmer or craftsman – with free-flowing schedules and human-centric rhythms – was receding. Instead, people lived to the pace of the clock, the bell and the machine.

Recently, the pendulum has swung the other way. We have been worshipping split-focus, multitasking and other time-splicing. We’ve been trying to supercede the fetters of both biology (sleep, rest) and the clock (agenda, schedules) by multitasking – by layering time. And so we’ve deluded ourselves into believing that splitting our focus – distraction – is the new ticket to efficiency.

Can we discover the middle ground? We need to multitask, skim and split our focus in order to deal with the oceans of possibility at our fingertips via the web. We also need rigid focus – aka concentration – in order to go deeply in problem-solving and relations. But let’s start thinking of these various types of attention as options, as arrows in our quiver, rather than as zero-sum, winning-or-losing cognitive styles.

Last week, I wrote about Ellen Galinsky’s important new book , Mind in the Making, on the seven life skills that every child needs today. Recently, I caught up with Galinsky and asked a bit more about the book’s genesis and her views on learning. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

MJ – What vision of learning did you have for the book?

EG – We’re born engaged in learning, because it’s basically a survival skill. If we couldn’t figure out the world, we wouldn’t survive. For a long time, we’ve understood learning as the acquisition of content and facts. More recently, there’s been a push for learning skills that will help young people when they reach the workforce. In writing the book, I was particularly interested in the kinds of learning that can help children now and will also help them in the future. I thought a lot about moving from a 20^th-century to a 21^st-century view of learning. We get stuck in an either/or situation: either content, or skills. To me, the point is, it has to be both.

MJ – In what other ways are you trying to broaden our definitions of learning?

EG – When parents are asked what they want for their children, most say they want them to be caring, contributing people who have meaningful lives. They don’t want them just to become successful in academics (which of course is important, too). The skills I’m writing about are for a well- rounded person, not just a one-size-fits-all person. A person on Twitter wrote me that the reason she likes the book is that: “Your message is clear: The self-motivated, independent children who are resourceful and know how to cooperate are our future.”

MJ – It seems to me that the seven skills you’ve highlighted are also fairly low-tech, and I love that about the book. They’re based on simple, everyday activities that any parent can inspire and guide.

EG – I remember meeting a low-income parent who said that she wants the same things for her child as a rich parent can give their children. In writing the book, it was important to me that whatever I was suggesting be something that any parent could use for children of any age. Often it is the simple things done differently – “simon says” played the opposite way – that promote learning. I will be appalled if people take this and make stuff that parents have to buy. Of course, it’s the job of marketing and product developers to find things to sell us. But we’ve been promised quick fixes with Baby Einstein or Brainy Bay: “do this, and then you will have a child who’s a genius.” We’ve been through that, and hopefully we’ve learned from that. Learning should be fun. If it’s just drill and practice for your 2 year old, that’s not good. I used to watch in horror as a friend drilled her baby: “This is a lesson about balls.” As I watched, I was thinking, “Just let him explore the ball. Ask him questions that promote his interest.” What I found consistently is that children are born with all the right equipment to gain knowledge. They have what I call in the book an object sense, a numbers sense, a people sense. The brain is wired to understand knowledge in specific ways.

MJ – How have our views on childhood changed in regards to learning? We used to have a Lockean view of children, that they are a “tabula rasa” or blank slate, needing to be filled with facts. Or we had a perspective inspired by the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that children are naturally gifted with curiosity and other traits that become devalued by schooling. Where are we now in our views of children?

EG – We have had a burst in knowledge about child development, particularly with neuroscience and with the ability to study children’s learning from many different disciplines. This knowledge has taken us beyond the “tabula rasa” or “put them in the sun, and water them and they’ll grow” viewpoints. There are no genetic expressions without experience, nor vice versa. For example, we used to think there are nine different types of temperament, and children are born with one of them. Now the latest thinking on temperament is that children vary in terms of how they react to new experiences, and how they regulate their responses. It’s much more of a process than a personality type. We also now know that children’s brains are wired in ways that enable them to grasp complicated knowledge. For example, work by Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin shows that babies have the ability to grasp which sounds in their language or languages go together. It is a process of detecting patterns in what she calls a “sea of sound.” But we have to build on this knowledge to promote the learning of life skills and content.

MJ- The idea that learning opportunities are all around us, every minute of the day is both inspiring and perhaps daunting to parents today who are so anxious about raising children the “right way.” What would you say about today’s anxious parents?

EG – There are so many people who criticize parents about their desire to do the right thing. As parents we’ve always started out wanting to be perfect and that probably is a good thing. We then realize we have to be good enough. I have studied parental growth and development and think that that needs to be understood by all those who write about parents – and by parents ourselves. When we reach the ‘good enough’ stage, we tend to relax and enjoy the process more.

MJ – What surprised you as you researched and wrote the book?

EG – Although I have an extensive background in child development and its research, creating this book felt like such a learning adventure. That to me was the biggest challenge of the book: to capture in words the mystery, the excitement, the wrong turns researchers made, to tell the story of researchers as people. That’s why I told the story of Dan Stern, who became a baby researcher because, as a toddler himself who could speak only Czech, he spent months in an English-speaking hospital, where he learned to watch behavior, since he didn’t understand language.

When I was getting ready to start to write a chapter, I would immerse myself in reading the interviews I had done with researchers. I would immerse myself in the research, then I’d go find out things I didn’t know. Then I would put it all aside and write the story I was discovering as an outline. As I was writing the outline, I was seeing so many new connections. Those connections always surprised and delighted me.