Multitasking
An article in the Atlantic, The Autumn of the Multitaskers, has some interesting observations about multitasking. The theme is that multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.
My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.
To us.
Multitasking is the antithesis of “flow”, of peak experience. For example, I can’t do a sudoku and watch television at the same time. I can’t watch television and do a sudoku during the commercials. Either the television interferes with the sudoku or the sudoku interferes with the television and I don’t enjoy either one. (I think the reason that movies are so much more satisfying in a theater than on television is that television deliberately breaks the viewer’s focus every few minutes.)
Finally, for a more direct experience:
