Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow art and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.

Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.

It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. And according to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a collective wish to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex  systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market. Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification - that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.

Note: This post first appeared on Boston College’s Work-Family Network, where I occasionally blog.  

      “Are you listening?” cries the father character in Distracted, a play I saw last weekend in New York. “Name one friend of ours who really listens,” he demands of his wife.

      This fast-paced and often funny play focuses on a couple who are trying to decide whether to medicate their son, who’s been diagnosed with ADD. The play resembles a tv sitcom, with plentiful one-liners, quick-change staging and one-dimensional characters. There is the baffled mom wanting to do the right thing for her son; an angry, hyper dad who sees his son as just another rambunctious boy; an exhausted teacher; prescription-happy shrink, and on and on.

       But there are poignant moments, especially when the play raises questions that transcend the narrow issue of treatments and diagnoses. In these moments, the audience is brought face to face with the deeper costs of our scattershot focus and punctured togetherness. Then, we begin to see the mini-tragedies of mutual inattention that we experience and set in motion each day.

      The dad, for instance, is always hopping up and down, interrupting his wife, checking his pda and storming out of meetings with specialists. So it’s particularly powerful when he suddenly begins his lamentation about listening. Few of the characters truly listen to one another. They’re too busy pursing their own agendas. (How fitting that I sat in front of two couples who chatted to one another audibly throughout the play.)

     Like many people, I noticed a seeming decline in mutual listening in our society, but until I wrote about this skill in my Globe column, I underestimated its importance and complexity. Listening demands practice, patience and critical thinking. It is a learned skill, and a building block of good relations. “Listening is really the skill of being in the conversation, rather than being in your own conversation,” says Jim Bolton, who does corporate training in listening.

      We also can’t really consider how we listen, without thinking about our soundscapes. A new inter-disciplinary field of aural architecture has grown out of early acoustical engineering work. Barry Blesser and others in the field explore the aural aspects of physical spaces, including how they affect relationships. For example, consider how the hushed quiet of a church affects people’s interactions within. Or how television, jet engines and loudspeaker announcements affect the social environment of an airport. Soundscapes aren’t just a matter of volume control, just as listening isn’t simply an act of hearing.

     At the end of the play Distracted, the mom has an epiphany: if her son has an attention-deficit, perhaps he needs more of her attention.  In the closing scene, she and her husband quietly watch as her son dances to his favorite music. Playwright Lisa Loomer told the New York Times that she thought that this scene may be misinterpreted. But I think she got it right. Fractured, frazzled, absent attention is a modern syndrome that we can’t afford to ignore. 

Postscript: After finishing this post, a kind soul sent me a Guardian UK blogger’s piece defending her right to twitter at the theater. Sending Tweets during a show may be rude to the actors and audience, writes Ruth Jamieson, but “not twittering is so rude” to her followers. “They are my priority,” she writes. Remember neuroscientist Susan Greenfield’s controversial remarks about how social networking tools may be infantilizing us - promoting instant-gratification, impulsivity, short attention spans? 

No one likes to be called a baby, whether they are age five or 35. That’s one reason why recent comments by British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield that today’s technologies may be “infantilizing the brain” are inspiring heated debate – and plentiful misunderstanding. I don’t agree with all that she said about virtual social relations, but she’s right to raise these fears. Only through well-reasoned public discussion and careful research can we begin to understand the impact of digital life on our social relations and on our cognition. Recently, I was asked by the Neuronarrative blog to comment on the brouhaha:

What did she say? In a statement to the House of Lords and in interviews, Lady Greenfield first pointed out that our environment shapes our highly plastic brains, and so it’s plausible that long hours online can affect us. She’s right. “Background” television is linked to attention-deficient symptoms in toddlers. High stress impedes medical students’ mental flexibility. I agree that “living in two dimensions,” as she puts it, will affect us.

As a result of video games and Facebooking, are we acting like babies, living for the moment, developing shorter attention spans? Again, she’s right to worry. Facebook and video games aren’t passive. Yet much of digital life is reactive. We settle for push-button googled answers, immerse ourselves in “do-over” alternate realities, spend our days racing to keep up with Twitter, email and IM. This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity – skills sorely needed in this era.

Consider this issue as an imbalance of attention. Humans need to stay tuned to their environment in order to survive. We actually get a little adrenaline jolt from new stimuli. But humans need to pursue their goals, whether that means locating dinner or hunting for a new job. By this measure, our digital selves may be our lower-order selves. As ADHD researcher Russell Barkley points out, people with the condition pursue immediate gratification, have trouble controlling themselves and are “more under the control of external events than of mental representations about time and the future.” He writes that ADHD is a disorder of “attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival.” Today, as we skitter across our days, jumping to respond to every beep and ping and ever-craving the new, are we doing a good job preparing for the future?

Finally, Lady Greenfield spoke about two types of social diffusion prevalent in digital living. First, she correctly points out that today’s fertile virtual connectivity has a dark side: it’s difficult to go deeply when one is juggling ever-more relationships. This is both common sense, and backed up by research showing that as social networks expand, visits and telephone calls drop, while email rises. Second, Lady Greenfield observed how virtuality distances us from the “messiness” and “unpredictability” of face-to-face conversations. In other words, digital communications can weaken the very fabric of social ties. As I wrote in my book Distracted, an increasingly virtual world risks downgrading the rich, complex synchronicity of human relations to paper-thin shadow play.

If it weren’t for the Net, I likely wouldn’t have found out about Lady Greenfield’s comments, nor been able to respond to them in this way. Yet going forward, we need to rediscover the value of digital gadgets as tools, rather than elevating them to social and cognitive panacea. Lady Greenfield is right: we need to grow up and take a more mature approach to our tech tools.

Addendum: SharpBrains.com recently published part two of my interview with them.

We’re so busy, so “productive,” ticking off items off our agendas, clicking through over-stuffed in-boxes. But in what sense are we productive ? Could it be that we are racing ahead in the most shallow senses of the word?

 This is a particularly timely question as we reap the fall-out from an era of unprecedented, and often unthinking abundance. By unthinking, I mean activity without thought to consequence, to ourselves and others. Activity without perspective, especially on the future. Isn’t that the core of what’s been happening in terms of the environment, crimes like Madoff’s, and even the disintegration of deep family rhythms and rituals?

A short but important column in the U.K.’s Guardian newpaper this past weekend drives to the heart of this question of the cult of busyness.

“Telling ourselves we’re hugely stressed makes us feel important, in demand, even energised; it also gives us permission to avoid confronting deeper issues,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

 He writes, “… busyness is the perfect excuse: if you’re convinced that you’re overstretched and overwhelmed, you’re spared the terrifying prospect of actually doing the things, and making the changes, that you want - or say that you want, since busyness spares you from examining that question, too.”

  Notice the word “terrifying.” Burkeman’s comments remind me of a man I met at a futurist conference who spoke glowingly of his new cell phone that worked globally. (This was a while back.) He told the audience, “Now, I never have to be alone.”

  Yes, it’s often terrifying to be alone with oneself. And it’s terrifying to take responsibility for ourselves - and for the care and keeping of our world.

   Addendum: A site called Sharp Brains and a blog called Neuronarrative both have posted email-interviews with me about Distracted. In both cases, the questions were intriguing.

                 When the Berlin Wall fell, I was a 29-year-old graduate student in international politics at the London School of Economics. As the news hit, many of my younger classmates jumped on flights to Germany to witness history being made. I stayed in the library, unwilling to risk tarnishing my last chance at schooling with a poor grade. I was a dutiful girl. It was a decision I’ve long regretted.

            This was the story I told my 16-year-old daughter the week before the inauguration, after our family unexpectedly was given tickets to the ceremony. The windfall caused an immediate dilemma: the inauguration fell in the midst of Emma’s crucial junior-year mid-term exams.

                 To be in Washington, she’d have to miss one exam, lose two days of precious study time, and endure crowds, cold and who-knows how many hours of travel time, all in a year when grades count heavily for college. Staying home, of course, meant missing one of the most rare political milestones of our time. Emma paused, torn between playing it safe and taking a risk, between sticking to the script and writing herself into the fairy tale.

            Some might find her hesitation astonishing, but believe me, it resonates immediately with many smart, achieving women who still struggle with the dutiful girl within them. They are the women who do all the required reading, shoulder the bulk of the work for the slackers on the team, and who keep silent while their bosses take credit for their ideas. “Good girls” are groomed to play it safe, to do their best, to color inside the lines, to defer to the rules. Doesn’t Cyndi Lauper plaintively sing, “girls just wanna have fun” – because they don’t have enough?

            We all face these moments of inner conflict, times when we hesitate to bend or even break a rule for a higher good – or just for own sweet, selfish moment of enjoyment. Such dilemmas raise age-old, messy questions of self vs. group, conformity vs. rebellion, predictability vs. painful unknowns. Women don’t have the monopoly on experiencing life’s ever-present small, pass-fail tests. But studies do show that women tend to be more risk-averse in many areas of life, from financial decisions to choices of medical treatments. Historically, we’ve kept a fairly tight hold on the market for risk-avoidance. Maybe that’s why we’ve come so far, yet never done more held the Bible for a spouse on inauguration day.

            I’m not knocking duty, conscientiousness, or self-discipline. To slog through the reading, go the extra mile at work, and pass up the party to knuckle down on the project due Monday – that’s a key to achievement at all levels of life, as the brilliant work of Walter Mischel shows us.

            Mischel is a Columbia University professor best known for creating one of the most famous experiments in modern psychology. For decades, he asked 4-year-olds to sit in a room with a bell and a marshmallow, telling them that if they could wait until he returned, they would get two marshmallows. Those who held out became more socially competent, resilient, articulate, attentive teens who scored higher on their SATs and earned more degrees. Self-control may be more important than smarts or ambition in predicting success in life.

            Still, too much or too little self-control is toxic. If nurtured too assiduously, willpower becomes rigidity. Excessively postponing gratification can be a “joyless choice,” warns Mischel. At the same time, if we have too little self-control, “the choice is lost.” Without discipline, we become prey to our whims and impulses, creatures of distraction and greed. To buckle down and tenaciously fulfill your duty, yet know when to change course and take the risky leap:  that’s embracing life, with all its inherent chance and serendipity.

            What happened to Emma? She burrowed into her books through the pre-inaugural weekend, her little sister picked up the slack on chores, her homeroom advisors unhesitatingly urged her to go, and she got to make up the exam she had missed –- in American history. For that one day, she lived – not just studied - history. 

Recently, I was asked a good question - why are we as a nation addicted to multitasking? - by Mike Hoyt, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic.

To preface, let’s just say that this topic couldn’t be more important now. A number of people have been pointing out the links between my book, with its sub-title flagging a dark age, and the economic mess we are in. An overdependence on our machinery as an outsourced brain, a tendency to undercut our powers of focus and attention, a yearning for the instant, push-button answer rather than the hard work of problem-solving - these are some of the reasons why we face such a deep, steep economic dive.

And then there’s the multitasking. Let’s take a look at the blind love of multitasking in our culture today.

First, I think that we can trace a line between our economic habits and culture and the legacy of Frederick W. Taylor, the great efficiency expert. His influence on global capitalism is still enormous. There’s a section in the book that gives detail, but in brief, he forced workers to chop up work into almost interchangable parts in order to make each piece of a task go faster. In turn, his influential teachings eviscerated the organic quality of craftsmanship and in many senses, turned people into machines, as Peter Drucker and others have noted.

It’s been heartening and exciting to experience the launch of Distracted. The tremendous response - Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, New York Times - underscores our collective uneasiness with the steep and mounting costs to our overloaded and distracted lives.

I’ve been particularly intrigued by the spectrum of interest. Parents, educators, politicos, corporate leaders, and workers alike - in this country and around the world - are interested in the book’s portrait of our lives and the suggested solution: to avert a dark age, we must spark a “renaissance of attention.”

Check out this week’s adaptation in BusinessWeek, along with a video interview of me: 

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089055162244.htm

Here’s the New York Times guest blog that will appear in this Sunday’s Business section:

http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/attention-must-be-paid/

And today’s interview on BuzzFlash: http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/1161

Last, Wisconsin Public Radio ran an hour-long talk-show on the book:

http://www.wpr.org/merens/index.cfm?strDirection=Prev&dteShowDate=2008-06-19%2016%3A00%3A00

Stay tuned! As I travel to Minneapolis, Boston, Washington, DC and other cities for talks about the book, I’ll blog further on people’s concerns and suggestions.

How did I come to write a book about attention — and our collective ADD?

The short answer is, I backed into the subject.

The Role of Technology — Overload, hurry, boundary-less living: these topics have been mainstays of my writing for the past decade. But a few years ago, I became fascinated by the role of technology in this new world. The computer, cell phone and then the pda seemed to be rewriting work, home and everything in-between. Was it all so simple: new gadgets, new world? And how could we tame these wondrous devices, since we certainly couldn’t go back to a tech-free age?

I sought clues in history, thinking that the first high-tech age, which ushered in inventions from the telegraph and cinema to the jet, rail and car, could show me how to manage our own frenetic time. And it was eye-opening — but not in the way I expected. I discovered that our lives of split-focus, hyper-mobility, and alternative realities are not all new. Rather, the first high-tech era ushered in new experiences of time, space and place that we’re still wrestling with today. Our age is essentially the culmination of forces unleashed centuries ago.

Epiphany! Attention is the Key — And most importantly, this age of speed and overload is undermining our powers of attention. Attention — that’s the key to understanding how to cope with 21st-century living. We’ve overstepped the boundaries of our attentional capacity – that’s why we’re increasingly miserable amidst our technological riches.

A dark age? — Those two words in the title of my book are attention-grabbers. Are they alarmist? As I began to investigate the fate of attention in a digital age, I dug into studies of turning points in civilization. Perhaps it shook me that great thinkers from Umberto Eco to Harold Bloom to Jane Jacobs have called our time a “dark age.” Perhaps I was struck by the fact that we so often label our own era a new age, be it digital or information. What is a dark age, and why do complex, affluent societies begin to falter? These questions are crucial to understanding the costs of our speed-driven, hyper-complex and attention-deficient lives.

That’s how I came to write a book about attention — and much more.

Distracted isn’t about weighty theories, or dusty trends from the past. It’s all about the new science of attention, which is mapping, decoding and defining this essential human skill for the first time. And it’s about our power bar-grabbing, frenetic multitasking, info-overloaded, cyber-centric, no-time-to-focus lives.

• We connect with millions of people across the globe, but have trouble grabbing dinner with those we love.
• We can tap into billions of info-bytes, yet increasingly we create knowledge from what’s first-up on Google.
• We’ve cut back on sleep and time with hobbies, friends and neighbors — yet still feel that we can’t afford to pause, relax — even take a vacation day.

Distracted is about how we shape the future — and whether we have much of a say in what tomorrow brings, or whether we’re going to give it half an eye and a shred of focus as we hurry on by, too distracted to notice the course of our lives.

Attention — that’s the key!