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Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention - Softcover

Jackson, Maggie

 
9781633884625: Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1633884627 ISBN 13: 9781633884625
Verlag: G38-Prometheus, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

This visionary book details the steep costs of our deepening crisis of distraction and reveals remarkable scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus and sustained attention.

In the first edition of this groundbreaking book, Maggie Jackson sounded a prescient warning of a looming crisis: the fragmentation of attention that is eroding our abilities to problem-solve, innovate, and care for one another. Now in this updated edition with an incisive new preface, she offers both a renewed wake-up call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing problems of our time.
           
How can we harness the technological marvels of our age more wisely and turn data into knowledge and distraction into skillful attention? How can we reset human bonds in a time of deep disconnection? We must, she argues, curb technological excess by cultivating the full gamut of our attentional capabilities. We must look first to the human behind the device.
           
Jackson is our expert guide in exploring the historic roots of distraction, the perils we face in melding human and machine, and the cutting-edge science that reveals the attentional skills most needed in an age of overload. Timely and unforgettable, Distracted offers a harrowing yet hopeful account of the fate of our highest human capacity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist whose commentary and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, and on National Public Radio, among many other publications. Her essays feature in numerous anthologies, including The State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide (Penguin, 2010). A former Boston Globe contributing columnist, Jackson lives in New York City and Rhode Island with her family.

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Preface to the New Edition

The pace was brisk and the dialogue frenetic. The one-liners flew thick and fast. In a small New York theater, I was watching Distracted, a play centered on a mother’s struggle to cope with her nine-year-old son’s attention deficit disorder. The year was 2009. Onstage, a mammoth wall of television monitors spewing sports, news, and sitcoms competed with the actors for the spectators’ attention. And just in front of me, two women in the audience compounded the evening’s cacophony with a running sideshow of phone-checking and chatter.
 
Nearly a decade ago, the world was growing ever more noisy and overloaded. We didn’t need to fire up a laptop, a BlackBerry, or its new competitor the iPhone to feel the insistent clamor of modern life. Were these glorious new riches for the heart and mind or an excess to be feared? we wondered. “This is an ADD society,” Distracted’s playwright Lisa Loomer told an interviewer, “and I don’t know whether this is a dysfunction or a difference.” It was the heyday, after all, of our yearning to live in the fast lane. Multitasking was a job description, a sure mark of success. Juggling was a mother’s main ambition, the booster rocket to having it all. The problem of distraction, we fervently hoped, was someone else’s burden, a malady for those who simply couldn’t keep up. We didn’t need to pay much attention to the costs of this way of living, or so we thought. The future was ours to splice. Distracted, the play, was billed as a comedy.
 
Now the curtain rarely falls on quick-cut, split-focus living. A crisis of inattention has crept onto center stage of an increasingly technological world. Skimming as a mainstay, days mired in trivia, interactions faceless and fractured, perpetually shattered focus: all these are no longer the daily diet of an elite and busy few. Toddlers stare with glazed eyes at the screen of the moment, oblivious to the real world blooming all around them. Early on, they learn that neat, easy answers come from gleaming little boxes that mesmerize their parents. In an era prizing diffusion, the young in effect are groomed to be half there, in class or at the dinner table, in the office or crossing the street. By one estimate, people check their devices an average of eighty-five times or more a day, anxiously searching for yet another dopamine-laced reward. So habituated are we to the siren song of being elsewhere that the mere presence of our own phone, silent and untouched, dramatically undermines our powers of focus. A Pandora’s box has sprung open. The struggle now seems real, and we are increasingly torn and uneasy. Americans are almost evenly divided over whether technology has had a positive overall effect on their lives. A majority of middle and high school teachers now believe that technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically. Is all this just the price to be paid for progress? Or are we, at growing cost to our very humanity, chasing a mirage?
 
A decade ago, the signs were all there and this book sounded a prescient warning. We have been perilously slow, however, in waking up to a crisis of our own making and even to the depths of our distraction. Avid multitaskers, for instance, are least able to juggle well and yet are most confident in their ability to do so. Or consider that beckoning phone. In laboratory studies, most of those whose focus is impaired in the presence of their devices later insist that they have not been affected at all. They are oblivious to what scientist Adrian Ward calls the “brain drain” of distrac-tion. Are we at last willing to question our hubris and take the full measure of our plight? Are we ready to face up to one of the most pressing problems of our age? Today I see our growing unease as a starting point, a potent spur toward an urgently needed reckoning. Attention is the stepping-stone to wisdom, intimacy, and creativity. It is the capacity that decides the fate of the present moment and determines the shape of the future. Without it, we are adrift. It is now time to focus on what matters and give attention its due.
 
As I write these words, a public outcry has erupted, condemning the behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple for failing to protect our data and our politics from hackers. But perhaps most unsettling has been the discovery that the inventors whom we so revere have themselves been hacking our minds. “Their most precious asset, is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it,” writes critic Franklin Foer. To public applause, Google turncoat Tristan Harris reveals the brain-hacking tricks that the “world’s smartest minds” have devised to influence people’s every online move: the slot machine–like bursts of rewards that keep us hooked to our devices, the urgency implied by notifications that constantly interrupt us, and the video autoplay that undercuts a viewer’s agency. Day by day, increasingly sophisticated technologies exploit the ceaseless yearning for validation and novelty that underlies human survival. “It’s the devil’s work,” a sales executive tells me, holding up his phone as we stand outside a funeral home waiting in line to enter a wake. He seems distressed and yet proud that he is constantly needed, or so his device tells him. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him struggle to finish a text just before we reach the casket.
 
Is escape then our best recourse for salvaging what one app developer calls our “cognitive liberty”? Not long ago, a detox referred to a renunciation of drugs or alcohol by abusers; now it is more often synonymous with a comic-tragic hiatus from technology that’s open to all. A grand-mother relates that her friends force their grandchildren to park their screens in baskets by the front door when they visit. Professors assign brief withdrawals to tremulous students. Joining a burgeoning market-place for digital detox retreats, hotels from Paris to Pittsburgh offer to lock up guests’ devices before ushering them to tech-free spas or suites. The off button, we believe, can keep distraction at bay, allowing for a magical restoration of all that we have lost in a time of stolen attention. It offers a Romantic hope, a page from Rousseau: if we can withdraw from our devices, we can be cleansed of the toxins of digital living and recover the gifts of an attentive mind. We once again can frolic, as Keats wrote in Ode to Psyche, in “the wreath’d trellis of a working brain.”
 
Yet so often we falter, eschewing or outright failing the Facebook Fast or Media Sabbath. Sixty-five percent of American adults deem periodic unplugging important for their mental health, yet less than a third of those who say this do so. In one experiment, most of one thousand college students from ten countries couldn’t last twenty-four hours without media, even for a class assignment. Some quit after just half an hour. When I interviewed University of Maryland students taking part in a pilot study for the project, many admitted to the merits of the detox. They had paid more attention to their studies and felt more productive. Yet the silence and aloneness of an unmediated day unnerved them. “I was out of my element almost,” said a junior, a journalism major from Boston. “I had no connection to anything.” In the end, the grand forces of distraction seem too relent-less, too inevitable, and surely too inviting to be tamed with a mere respite. And so we increasingly turn back to the machine for answers, hoping that the mechanized marvels that beset us can protect us as well.
 
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Verlag
G38-Prometheus
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1633884627
ISBN 13 
9781633884625
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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