Scanning for Musty Cheese

From this chapter (Teaching Gen M: The Wired Life) by Klapperstuck and Kearns, it sounds like I am to consider the possibility, or maybe even accept the assertion, that members of Gen M are not multi-tasking when they are hanging out at, well, wherever they hang out, intermittently talking, texting, answering their mobile phones, and popping their ear buds in and out and saying "what?"; no, they are engaging in "continuous partial attention" (bottom, p. 120). And it appears that I am, further, to entertain the notion that they don't just proficiently "scan the incoming alerts" to glean content from that "one best thing to seize upon" that's probably already airborne, that next "most interesting or important opportunity" (again, p. 120) in the form of a post, text, video, or IM; no, they also resend these items, and some of their own, around so that they can become the content.

Let us consider the difference between multi-tasking and this "continuous partial attention" (let's call it CPA, sorry accountants). I always thought of multi-tasking as engaging in multiple tasks simultaneously and attending to each at its critical times while the others are not at their critical times, with the ultimate goal of bringing them all to a successful conclusion. The downfall of this, of course, is that one has to be able to do the calculus on each of those tasks in advance to know when that pot of water is going to boil and be ready for the green beans, when the burgers on the barbie will reach the right level of doneness to be flipped, and also keep an ear out for the dog who went outside without his leash and might bark and then run away because he sees someone on the road. Actually, the dog doesn't require calculus, he takes a crystal ball. So now, CPA: I view that more like a truck driver listening to his CB radio for the next cool transmission, only he's not driving a truck (one activity), he's engaged in 3 to 5 activities. So this is like multi-tasking and expecting the equivalent of a page from God any second, which will be that "next great thing" worthy of attention, or, umm, partial attention.

I don't think I like that. Is that a recipe for success? Do we wonder why more and more people are struggling with ADD? Yes, I know, it said somewhere in the chapter that this isn't necessarily shortening attention spans. (Pregnant pause.) Uh huh...

May I tell you a little story? I know a woman who works with a younger woman, a member of Gen M (no names to protect the innocent and the guilty). In a given day, the one I know will get 18 to 22x done, where x is a task that, on average, works out to take a fairly regular amount of time. While she works, she does not listen to an IPod, she does not check Facebook, she doesn't talk every few minutes with those around her, she doesn't blog, text, or Twitter: she keeps her head down, talks little, and works...hard... She checks her personal e-mail at lunch and she may make a personal phone call or two and read the news while she eats. Then it's back to work. Meanwhile, the Gen M member (& no, I'm not saying that all Gen M-ers do this, so don't even start with the claims of age discrimination), the Gen M-er engages in precisely this process of "continuous partial attention." She check texts and e-mail, she often pops into Facebook between each x (remember x=task), she hops into conversations going on around her, and at the end of the day, surprise surprise, she has about half of the x's completed that my acquaintance does. There are days she gets almost nothing done, because she "just can't focus."

Call me old fashioned, but do we want kids to be practicing "continuous partial attention" when they are pilots, doctors, truck drivers, cabbies, dentists, currency traders, and SWAT team members? (Will they be able to shut it off when they need to. The young woman in the story can't.) So why are we looking for ways to excuse it now? Sometimes, that "most interesting and (seemingly) important opportunity" will be just enough to distract us from something much more important, like flying a commercial jet or driving a car. Weren't those two pilots on their "laptops" when they overshot their destination by a few hundred miles? Okay, bad example, but you get the point. Need another one? Texting while driving, now illegal in MI.

There's another angle on this. Assuming it would be of some interest to somebody; what would Henry David Thoreau think of all this?

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are" (Walden, on solitude).

He was talking about ice cream socials, running into each other at the post office, and breaking bread a few times a day, not texting every few minutes, or seconds. According to Nielson (May 2009, http://www.healthnews.com/family-health/child-health/average-teen-output-eighty-text-messages-day-3194.html), the average teenager sends 80 texts a day. Let's just say we should divide those 80 texts into 16 hours of waking time. That's musty cheese every 12 minutes. Now let's consider cell calls. That's 5 per day on average (Pew Research). What about Tweets, IMs, and e-mails? How often are they being distracted with cheese, every 30 seconds? I say "continuous partial attention" is a euphemism for "distraction."

I had some positives, too, but I think that's enough punishment for you readers (assuming there are any) so no details. One had to do with comfort with the Internet. It boils down to sites. I think younger people may understand that safety is about where you are. Shopping Amazon (Bezos: "relentlessly customer focused") is one thing, buying a navel ring from XYZ Jewelry is another.