Slashdot Mirror
Life Interrupted
sch7572 writes "Seattle Times carried this story which may be of interest to those addicted to checking Slashdot for new stories every minute. Scientists are concerned that the Information Age is nurturing 'cognitive overload,' an umbrella term for the malaise people feel as a result of distraction, stress, multitasking, and data congestion related to increasingly sophisticated technologies. People multitask because it is expected, encouraged, and considered vital, yet cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities."
For a while now I've been anti-interruption. I shun any kind of unsolicited alert about events such as new email arriving, a friend signing on to an IM network or the phone ringing. I find I enjoy activities a lot more now that I can see them through to completion without beeping and flashing alerts interrupting me at arbitrary moments.
I don't multi-task because I HAVE to, but often because I WANT to. I monitor a couple of dozen sites and I enjoy reading them. I like learning new stuff, constantly expanding my understanding of the world and of myself. Maybe it works for some and not others, but I wouldn't have it any other way. It just seems boring to me to do one thing at a time, not to mention a complete waste of precious time.
A blog like any other.
I find it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
The young techno-elite grew (and are growing) up immersed in this sea of information, and are adapting to it. The older generations, having grown up in a much slower-paced environment, have difficulty adapting to the rapid change in the information channels available to them.
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.
For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.
The idea might scare some people, but I find it fascinating.
I suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information, are not ready to cope with the fact that most information is useless. Part of the ability to accept the input is the ability to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I read slashdot several times a day, but I don't read every comment or every article. I read the ones that will be useful to me in some way. I'm connected to the net most of the time, but I ignore an incoming IM if I'm busy doing something else.
People who aren't used to this environment have trouble ingoring things. You know the type. People who insist on answering the phone no matter how busy they are at that moment. People who check their email immediately whenever they reveive a "new mail" notification. These people can't cope with the available information, and are overwhelmed by it.
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If you knew how to manage your base while fighting, you would be more effective in battle. This carried over to Starcraft and Warcraft3 where I was vastly superior to other players. Its critical to multitask in games like that, but its helped me learn how to multitask other things.
One thing multitasking isn't good for is programming complex things while doing other things. When we're programming, we need to use our memory to keep track of all the variables and threads going on. If we start doing others things, we can be distracted because our brain has trouble with the memory and it impairs our coding.
Another thing that's not good to multitask is driving with a cell phone. If you get too caught up in the conversation, your attention can be diverted from the road. You can normally drive like a zombie, but in times of emergency response you could be screwed. Also if someone does something stupid to cause a wreck, people may blame your cell phone even if you weren't at fault.
God spoke to me.
Here's a few reasons why multitasking is generally necessary for some aspects of life:
1) 24 hours in the day, approx 8 of which are downtime/sleep. Most of us also portion out 9 or so to earning our keep, and a couple hours get lost due to necessary evils (travel, taking a breather, movement in general). That usually leaves about 5 hours of time during which you can do your own thing. You can push that figure upwards (scrape off hours of sleep, skip work, arrange things so that your wasted couple of hours are more like 30 minutes). However, when you think about it, 5 hours really isn't that long a time to do much during the week.
2) Multiple interests. Myself, I love to play music (piano, clarinet, guitar -- still learning the last one), play video games (PC, PS2), program applications, maintain my network, watch some TV shows, etc. Not the least of those interests is keeping up with friends and going out to do things with them. Now, of course there is the whole 'priority' thing going on here of which I want to do more, but regardless, the list is fairly expansive.
These two things lead to a problem. How do I do as many things as I want to do in the limited time that I have available? It's true that my 'weekday' listing only allows roughly 5 hours of free time to myself, and that it ignores the roughly 14 hours I get on a weekend day, it still shows that the time that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do is limited. Some things take more time than I can allow for on a weekday. Some things that I want to do are low priority because they're new and atypical, yet I still really want to do them.
This can be summed up very easily in a bastardized phrase I learned from Economics. Limited Resources for Unlimited Wants. I want to do far more than I have time for, if I were to do them back to back. As some of those wants are even time dependant (keeping up with friends is a good one for that), if those are not done, then the opportunity is lost. The only answer that I can come up with is multitasking. Be it combining tasks into one (a simple method) or doing multiple tasks at once (true multitasking), that seems to me to be the only way to attend to as many of the wants as I can for the given time period.
Even with multitasking, I know I will not have time for everything I want to do, but at least I will be able to do more of them and not miss out on time-dependant tasks. I personally do not see this view as delusional or logically flawed. My approach to the problem may be different than the one you may choose, but it is still valid.
P.S. Dispite being a different individual than the parent of your post, while doing one thing at a time is not (to me) a 'complete waste of precious time', it is not using that time to it's fullest, either. If you have the capacity to do multiple things at once, and you do not do that, it can be viewed as wasting time.