Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

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Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Maggie Jackson (Prometheus, 2008)
Foreword by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben Reader.

Available at: Amazon.com | BN.com

We have oceans of information at our fingertips, yet we seek knowledge in Yahoo headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via email and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times.

Welcome to the land of distraction.

Distracted is a gripping exposé of this hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, attention-deficient life. Day by day, we are eroding our capacity for deep attention— the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. The implications for a healthy society are stark.

And yet we can recover our powers of focus through a renaissance of attention. Neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload.

In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its losses, Maggie Jackson introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, and even roboticists. She offers us a compelling wake-up call, an adventure story, and reasons for hope.

Reviews

Wall Street Journal review by David Robinson, June 12, 2008

Distracted included in annual book editor picks for the best summer books of 2008:“A prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe provides a timely and often horrifying look at our technology-addled lives today.“
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“a richly detailed and passionately argued… account of the travails facing an ADD society and how to reinvigorate a ‘renaissance of attention’”
—Publishers Weekly

“Maggie Jackson is one of the most original and perceptive journalists writing about the challenges of modern life. In Distracted, she explores our hectic, multi-tasking world. She shows that while digital technology fills our lives with information and entertainment, it is far too often at the expense of human contact and thoughtful reflection. This book will make you slow down and think.”
—Senator Amy Klobuchar

“This is an important and timely work. Distracted challenges us to reconsider the information saturated and demand driven world that we have created. Does our sensate culture, in eroding attention, threaten the self that is at the very pith of our humanity? In this rich compendium, broad ranging and carefully researched, Maggie Jackson tackles this question with finesse, distilling the essence from the chaos to end in hope.”
—Peter C. Whybrow, MD, director, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, author, American Mania: When More Is Not Enough

“This is an important book. Ohave commented on these issues, but I have never seen them gathered together and documented as completely as Maggie Jackson has done.”
—Alan Lightman, author of the bestselling Einstein’s Dreams and National Book Award finalist The Diagnosis and MIT professor

”Maggie Jackson’s fascinating book on America’s collective attention deficit disorder is a wake-up call to all of us to take back our lives, turn off the technology, and focus on paying attention to what makes us human and fulfilled.”
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School Professor and author of America the Principled and Confidence

What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age

Maggie Jackson (Sorin, 2002)

In our chaotic, high-tech age,the lines between work and home, public and private, are becoming increasingly blurred. In this changing time, Jackson explores the ever-changing role of home in our lives — and sets out to update our idea of home.

What’s Happening to Home? goes beyond debates about square footage and working moms, to shed light on the larger questions surrounding the idea of home. How can we find refuge without shortchanging the work lives so many of us value? How can we preserve times and spaces for intimacy and reflection without returning to rigid ideals of the past? Jackson offers an inspiring and illuminating look at the future of home, the centerpiece of our lives.

“Jackson has crafted an insightful book, more a cultural study than a guidebook, that will make readers reexamine how, where and why they work.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Not a book exhorting families to return to another time, this is instead a provocative look at work and family that challenges us to examine our lives and find our own solutions. … Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“Maggie Jackson has written an original, thoughtful, helpful book on a subject no smaller than how to live in the world. It is a serious pleasure to read.”
—Roger Rosenblatt