Maggie Jackson » attention

A CNN.com Blog: Does It Matter Where and When We Are?

maggie — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 13:38:53 +0000

I was asked to write this CNN.com blog as part of their recent series on our mobile society:

Tonight, as my husband stands in our bedroom, fingers whirling across his smartphone and eyes glued to its tiny screen, I have no idea “where” he is. Is he checking the score of his beloved home team, or dealing with a rant from an indefatigable boss overseas? Is he working or home-ing, or both?

This melding of work and home, of course, is an old story. In 1999, I wrote an article about three generations of a Baltimore family and their work-life balance. Shattering my romantic views on what it was like to live a few easy steps from work — literally over the store — the family’s elderly patriarch told me that his parents couldn’t wait to move to the suburbs and put some distance between family and work. Their hardware business had shadowed their evenings and weekends, stealing peace. Decades later, the patriarch’s restless, cell phone-toting, entrepreneurial son blamed the portability of work for his recent divorce. … read more

Are We Losing the Magic of Play in a Digital World?

maggie — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:12:37 +0000

We began by picturing a young Eleanor Roosevelt teaching immigrant children to dance in the very room where we were gathered. Long ago, a dashing young Franklin D. Roosevelt would come to escort her home. I could see in my mind’s eye his jaunty straw hat, the long twirling skirts, an awkward young woman brave enough to spend her evenings at University Settlement in lower Manhattan.

Nearly a century later, it was fitting that we began an evening’s conversation on the place of attention and imagination in a digital age with this feat of collective reverie. Our minds layered past over present – and the room seemed richer for the memory. Our capacity to move between the here and now and imagined worlds is central to our humanity.

But today are we driving children away from moments of reflection and imagination – and intimacy? Richard Lewis, a poet, organized the evening – the first of a series of three he is holding to examine this crucial question. The first evening in February attracted a dozen music and art teachers, artists, musicians and others. (The series continues March 12 and April 30.)

Play allows us to create a sense of internal space, began Lewis, founder of the Touchstone Center. In play, the young can make something out of the ordinary happen. The child starts the magic – a magic that can be shared. Lewis told of visiting a New York City classroom where he asked children what happens to the sun shining into a car? And could they recapture that sunshine? The children were intrigued. Suddenly, they were talking about “the human ability to imagine,” said Lewis.

We circled the room, offering stories of imagination and reflection in our early lives. A young woman told of the freedom that she felt when she danced. A man spoke of a special, secret rock in a city park. A friend of mine recalled ‘cooking’ with mud and grass as a child in the countryside. She’s now raising a city-bred daughter who didn’t play house with the earth as her toy. Yet she and her daughter now cook – for real – side by side, sharing moments of culinary togetherness. I talked about the magic of the woods where I played with my friends – the trees, ponds, paths and hide-outs that were practically characters in our playtime.

Then we began to gently explore what happens when children immerse themselves more and more in an entrancing digital world of another’s making. That evening as in the rest of our lives, there was a vague sense of worlds clashing. In celebrating the play of our own childhoods, we couldn’t help but worry about its increasing absence in children’s lives today, even as we celebrated the promise and achievement of the technological.

Long after the close of the evening, I mused about these questions, dallying with the differences, circling around these puzzles. And I see two causes for concern. True, digital living offers opportunities for the cultivation of imagination: videogames, tv and the ‘net offer entrancing, wildly visual fictions. Not since medieval times have we inhabited an era as richly visual as ours today. And that’s good.

Yet the screen is a hungry force in the world: children spend more than seven hours daily immersed in media, losing play-time, sleep, quiet and face-time. Lewis recalled watching a child on the subway, glued to a videogame, tuning out a parent who was insistently trying to engage him. If we drive children away from their innate needs to go within themselves to reflect and imagine, we’ll be losing something of our humanity. Are we looking up from our screens often enough – and teaching our children to do so?

As well, while digital escapades tap into the human imagination, immersing the player in entrancing worlds for hours on end, on-screen play too often demands that we fit into templates of another’s making. It provides alluring worlds, where we make choices. But these are not worlds of our own making.

We don’t yet fully understand what our technologies are doing to us, and how we in turn are shaping our machines. But we have to keep asking these questions – and looking up from our screens. I wrote this blog in fits and starts, reflecting over time. And one evening, I reread my notes from University Settlement house, as I hurtled through the night on a train.

In the café car, a mother and college-age daughter sat across from each other, mom in head phones glued to an ipad movie, daughter fiddling with her song lists while playing itunes out loud. Not a word was exchanged for hours. Nearby, a small boy played a video game as his dad toyed with his smart phone. When the father looked over and advised the boy on the game, the youngster hit him and screamed, ‘why’d you make me do that?’ Farther down the car, four women shared giggles and beers, and a couple played backgammon. Half of the people at the cafe tables were looking one another in the eye, sharing a laugh, talking. Half were not.

Where are we headed? What’s being lost and gained as we become entranced by these new forms of magic? And could a loss in time for play affect our ability to connect? I can’t help but think that a rich inner life sets the stage for deep human connection. Imagine that.

Of Einstein and Distracted Driving … and Writing

maggie — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:13:53 +0000

I shouldn’t kvetch about this, because then I’ll seem like the attention police – a role that I never have wanted to play. Distraction can be a great thing – a creative break, an unconscious impulse to steer in another mental direction, a welcome intrusion from a friend.

But Distraction isn’t the title of my book. And it’s amusing and sometimes frustrating to hear and see how often people make that slip of the tongue… from Distracted to -ion. I wonder if this happens all the time to other authors? Do we celebrate Dickens’ Good Expectations? Did Nabokov shock us with Lola? Is this a peculiarly post-modern symptom of our hurry and overload?

I just stumbled on a particularly amusing example, a humor column by Canadian filmmaker and writer Josh Freed … or was it Greed? … in the Montreal Gazette last fall. The column itself seems to have disappeared from the paper’s website, but I found it in a database by accident. Here’s a slice of it:

In her book Distraction, author Maggie Jackson warns of the shallow modern attention span she calls “Mcthinking.” She says it’s “eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention and stunting society’s…

Uh, sorry what’d she say? I checked my email partway through.

When I saw that a correction ran later in the Gazette, I was thrilled. Someone caught the mistake! But no, the correction alerted readers to the fact that Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky, wroteWar and Peace, another book mentioned in the column. Sigh. Note to the editor: How about giving a helping hand to the living author, the one who’s trying to feed her kids on her writerly profits?

Oh well. Thank you, anyhow, for the shout-out, Josh. As they say, any publicity is good publicity. And I’m glad that you are fighting the good fight against inattention in society.

And on that note, let me give Albert Einstein the last word on distraction. The great thinker once said:

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

Does Self-Control Come in an App?

maggie — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:59:10 +0000

My HuffPost blog from the weekend on the pros and cons of new apps that screen out digital distractions for us:

Last night, I got a PTA alert about a software application that allows users to block access to email and websites such as Facebook, while retaining use of the larger web for self-selected time periods. Parents and educators alike are buzzing about this new cure for our distracted, multitasking children.

The name of the app? SelfControl.

Certainly, children are inundated with info-streams, enticing video playgrounds and constant opportunities to visit the virtual party of Facebook. The average 8- to 18-year-old devotes more than seven hours and 38 minutes to entertainment media on a typical day, according to theKaiser Family Foundation. About half of young people use media most or some of the time they’re doing homework.

At the same time, young children and even teens often don’t yet have the cognitive capability to say no to distractions. The parts of their brains — the frontal lobes — that underlie higher-order will and thought continue to develop into their 20s.

Still, will flipping a switch to darken distractions help children to cultivate their powers of self-control? Or is such software just a quick fix for a hurried age? Similar software — “Freedom,” “Concentrate,” “Cold Turkey” — is proliferating. Are we once again leaping to adopt technologies, and then asking questions about how they shape us?

Humans, of course, are tool users. We close doors to create privacy. We reach for Post-It notes and apps to augment memory. Perhaps SelfControl, a free OS X application developed in 2010 by a high school student who is now an undergrad at Columbia University, helps augment our will power by guarding the boundaries that we repeatedly fail to respect ourselves. Sometimes our monkey minds do need external handcuffs.

But we should think more carefully about how we’re using SelfControl and other such apps, and whether we really want to hand them off to young children as ready solutions for taming overload.

At the least, using this app should be accompanied by lots of conversation about the ways we use technology and the subtle value systems that accompany their use. We’ve long equated speed with intelligence in the U.S.; the first hand up in the classroom is considered the smart kid. If we dole out apps such as “focus” or “will power” or maybe someday “empathy” to our children, we are subtly giving them the message that complex, difficult human faculties can be obtained with a click. That’s akin to doling out Ritalin while ignoring the environmental factors that have been shown to influence attention-deficiencies.

Placing these apps center-stage in our battle to tame technology ignores the effort and time needed to nurture self-control — and ultimately diminishes a sense of our own potential. It sounds passe to talk about patience as a “virtue,” as my Depression-era Dad did. But mastering a skill would be a hollow achievement if we could do so in a digital instant.

And as decades of research by Roy Baumeister, Walter Mischel and others show, self-control is a difficult skill that’s worth mastering. Along with intelligence, will power is arguably the most crucial means to a successful school and adult life. And it can be trained.

How do we help children cultivate their willpower? Teach them to respect the integrity of a moment. An interruption has ripple effects, breaking into and potentially clouding ongoing thought, while boosting stress and the risk of error, a wealth of studies show. Heavy multi-taskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford’s Clifford Nass.

Set up rules about media use. Sounds basic, but just three in 10 children under 18 are given any parental rules about how much TV and other media they can consume. Helpless parents now feel they cannot shape our increasingly all-embracing media environment. Yet when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media, studies show. Moreover, the very existence of a reasonable rule effectively shows children that the seeming unmanageable in life at least partially can be tamed.

Sure, when my teenage daughters are under deadline, inundated, and over-caffeinated, they might want to download SelfControl for a while. But as my 10th grader said with a laugh when I told her about this application, “Mom, that’s not self-control!”

Does Quiet Un-Nerve Us? A Muse on Tinker Tailor Soldier…

maggie — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:48:10 +0000

First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in a pub or when he gives a long, tipsy monologue about his encounter with Russia’s top spymaster. The action had slowed, the hunt had paused – and some voted with their feet.

It’s intriguing that this complex remake of John Le Carre’s classic thriller seems to divide us. Critics, as far as I can see, are mostly laudatory – extolling the cinematography, superb acting, the complex story line. But we, the viewers, seem to love or hate the film; only two of 34 reader-reviewers on The New York Times.com give the movie a score of three out of five. Most rate the movie one/two or a four/five, detesting the film as “slow” and “sluggish” or praising it as “brilliant” and “engaging” - and the naysayers outnumber the fans.

Writes marsacademy: “This film may not find a huge audience, because it has a quality of watchful stillness at its core, which is very unlike what the public expects of a ‘spy film.’ It is not an ‘action’ movie.”

Well put. I think that’s precisely why people were walking out. It’s just a movie of course, and excitement is subjective; your terrifying Ferris Wheel ride could be my aerial nap. But it’s perhaps a mark of our times that people could line up so vehemently in opposite corners over action vs. stillness. Although many of us increasingly battle for calm, we’re still surrounded by – and strongly influenced by – a culture of the quick hit, push-button, the ever-rising tide of busy-ness. After all, adrenaline is as addictive as drugs, studies show.

We may be so shaped by the gadget as appendage, tv as white noise and chit-chat as interaction that it seems stifling to be confronted by stillness. If so, we will surely miss out on the second and third layers of life, or the mysteries that perhaps even our best spymasters may never solve. Hurry past quiet, and we cease to see, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “allegory hard as a figured shield … polished until its undersurface surfaced, like peat smoke mulling through Byzantium.”

In life as in movies, we have to pause to see what’s beneath the polish.

These Great Sorrows

maggie — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:42:12 +0000

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.”

The Expansion of Experience – The Home/Work Blur Today

maggie — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 16:44:19 +0000

Just got back from the Business Marketing Association’s annual conference in Chicago, where I spoke on a general session panel entitled “The @Work State of Mind.” Rick Segal, president of the ad firm GyroHSR, moderated.

The boundaries between home and work are gone – that’s not news. But we’re still dealing with the fallout. At BMA, I noted that the division between these spheres was a short-lived Industrial Age experiment. Remember, the weekend and the vacation are recent (and fading) inventions.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re returning to an agrarian past. In the pre-Industrial past, the work-life blend stemmed from a restriction of human experience. People were rooted, and hewn to biological or cultural time flows. Now, work-life integration is due to an expansion of experience – a collapse of distance and a rush past the shackles of the clock. We’re free-floaters, for both better and worse.

We’re in constant “on” mode, a tempo that is inspiring and exhausting. Fellow panelist Eduardo Conrado, chief marketing officer at Motorola Solutions, told of being home, yet “snacking” on information all the time. A new study reports that 30 percent of mobile workers wake up at night to check email. (A blurring of sleep and wake?)

We’re having trouble finding the time and resources to pay attention deeply. Dalton Conley of NYU pointed out research showing that multitasking affects memory. When we juggle while trying to learn, we can’t recall the newly learned information deeply, and so cannot transfer this shallow learning to new situations. The opportunity is squandered.

Three-quarters of workers say they don’t have enough time with their children, even while studies show that parental time spent on childcare is at record highs. Why the disconnect? Multitasking. People feel time-starved, because they’re with their children, yet mentally away. As panelist Johnna Torsone, HR director at Pitney Bowes, pointed out, we have wonderful new ways to connect; she skypes with her West Coast grandson. But we can’t nurture deep relations without face time, and without at least sometimes preserving what I call the integrity of the moment. It’s essential to our humanity.

The implications for marketers? First, nurture ways to step in and out of the flow. Being immersed, hurried, interrupted and reactive is antithetical to deep thought and relations – and informed decision-making. Second, highlight stories. Narrative is more important than ever as essential form of meaning-making in a complex society. It’s a terra firma in this free-floating world. As Jerome Bruner notes, stories are mankind’s way of wresting meaning from surprise – from the times when something went awry.

Gyro kindly bought 100 copies of Distracted as a giveaway. As I signed them, people expressed their concern again and again for their children’s future. A world without deep focus is untenable, and we know it.

Information Overload and Our Reliance on the Machine

maggie — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:33:20 +0000

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.

The Attention Movement – Something’s Stirring

maggie — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:10:53 +0000

Months ago, Cali Williams Yost had a wish. In her FastCompany blog, she hoped that Distracted would start an attention movement similar to the new environmentalism sparked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And indeed, wherever I speak, people everywhere are asking, ‘where do we start? How do we regain our focus and spark the ‘renaissance of attention’ that you describe in your book?’

Well, that nascent movement just may be starting to pick up speed. Some signs:

People are talking. There are debates and discussions everywhere about our crisis of distraction. At work, people are drilling down into the roots of overload. At home, parents aren’t smiling much anymore about their kids’ addiction to texting. A new study showing the inefficiencies of multitasking is inspiring heated debate. (See my previous post on the research.) This is important. It’s time to come together and focus on the problem. That’s how solutions get sown.

People are acting. A Seattle University communications professor recently held an innovative faculty workshop on the impact of distraction on student life. Professors everywhere are frustrated by a chronic lack of attention in the classroom. But organizer Mara Adelman coaxed the discussion beyond griping and finger-wagging.

At the workshop, faculty talked about setting up clear, firm rules on tech use in class and holding kids accountable – no attention, no recommendation. But faculty also did a lot of soul-searching, according to the wonderful website that Adelman set up to keep the momentum of the event going. They talked about collectively working through “technoquette” issues, role modeling focus in their lives, and reminding one another and students how opportunities for connection and conversation are lost amidst epidemic distraction. One faculty member wrote later, “I used to complain about distraction but never spent time to analyze this problem. This workshop made me sit down and find ways to control distraction in my personal life and in the classroom.”

This is exciting, and it’s not a one-off example. I’ve heard of others crafting training events based on my book and other resources. Add to this the uptick in both state and employer bans on driving distracted, and I see the makings of a 360-degree movement.

Write to me if you have ideas on how to move the process forward!

PS – Check out this great blog post by Andrea Saveri, one of my favorite thinkers, on multitasking and the often overly simplistic discussions that erupt when we debate about the impact of technology on our lives. Hear, hear!

Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers

maggie — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:10:04 +0000

It’s late, and I’m flying to the Midwest tomorrow, so this will be short. But I want to chime in a bit on a new, small but important research study out of Stanford this week. There are already a number of media outlets writing about the study, which in a nutshell indicates that heavy multitaskers aren’t doing their juggling all that well. This is important. While we’ve seen a tremendous body of research showing that most multitasking is inefficient and error-prone, somehow there’s always been an assumption by many that heavy multitaskers can “do it” well. And that doesn’t appear to be true. Practice does help a little. For instance, air traffic controllers can scan a screen and juggle flights better than laypeople. But heavy multitasking doesn’t help boost focus or thinking skills, at least according to this study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by veteran researcher Clifford Nass and colleagues.

When asked to do simple task-switching in a lab setting, students who were heavy media multitaskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant data, and even did a lousy job of remembering what they were supposed to be doing. Wow. “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” said researcher Eyal Ophir in a Stanford press release. ”The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”

Sure, lab experiments aren’t the end of the story. But the study – which I’ve read in the original – clearly shows that heavy multitaskers are deficient in voluntary cognitive control while trying to perform simple task-switching. In other words, they are poor at controlling their focus, and “suckers for irrelevancy,” as Clifford Nass attests. That’s a disturbing finding, whatever cognitive benefits we may later discover in multitasking.

Certainly, attention is so all-encompassing and so crucial to our survival that we’re often not aware, so to speak, of how much information we’re processing in our environment and within what William James called our “stream of consciousness.” We are in many senses born interrupt-driven; to survive we have to be ever-alert to new stimuli in our environment. (And work by Jonathan Schooler indicates that mind-wandering may be good for creativity.) But at the same time, effortful attention, along with working memory, are keys to pursuing our goals. If we can’t sort out the irrelevant in a simple brief lab task, chances are we’re not doing such a great job in the wider, complex world. (And given the plasticity of our brains, it’s not unimaginable that heavy multitasking does shape and even undermine our ability to focus deeply, evaluate and assess the information around us.)

Drinking from the fire hose of media today may have its benefits, just as videogaming has been found to boost some types of visual attention. But let’s keep the big picture in mind. If we sacrifice cognitive control in the name of high-speed, reactive, distracted living, then the costs of multitasking will be steep indeed.