Multitasking, revisited

Some­thing that I have — through expe­ri­ence — thought myself:

Mul­ti­task­ing is bad for you {from CNN, from Hivelogic}:

“Com­pared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy mul­ti­taskers had slower response times, most often because they were more eas­ily dis­tracted by irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, and because they retained that use­less infor­ma­tion in their short-term memory.“

I do think there are those who are quite adept, per­haps genet­i­cally wired for an adroit­ness, at this this mode of thought + action. I mean, we all can do it to greater and lesser degrees, and Katya’s gen­er­a­tion seems to be con­di­tioned to pre­fer it (though I am not con­vinced that this is *not* to their detri­ment(1)); I have known peo­ple who live in this post­mod­ern, frac­tured state of mind and make envi­able progress — reJon comes to mind. But I mostly think about Schopenhauer’s essay on noise — not due to the noise itself (for noise, I do love), but rather the ‘dia­mond’ mind, which when cut into bits by an inter­rup­tion loses its value.

This may come as a sur­prise to any­one who has cared enough to track my pro­gres­sion as an artist and musi­cian, and the things I have espoused pre­vi­ously. I have been influ­enced by Cage, by chance, by Rauschenberg’s being the writ­ing on the wall ethos. I have cre­ated free-for-all struc­tures for art, I have spo­ken of chaos as other peo­ple would of ‘free­dom’(2). These things have always held an amaz­ing intel­lec­tual appeal to me. How­ever– gem­ini that I am– I think my deep­est con­nec­tions are to the Beuy­ses of this world — those who are, to use a word I am not even sure is a word, the mythopo­etic ones.

Ah, too much there to get into now. But let’s bring this back to the beginning:

I have noticed, per­son­ally and with many oth­ers I have observed qui­etly or not so qui­etly, that our con­stant state of task-bombardment is like an itchy pox: irri­tat­ing, unful­fill­ing, unful­fil­l­able. It’s like being trapped in the shal­low end of life. Itchy :) I have read pre­vi­ous stud­ies that track the amount of time it takes for a per­son, once inter­rupted, to return to their pre­vi­ous task/thought– approx­i­mately 15 min., if mem­ory serves me. Given the schiz­o­phrenic nature of most of our day jobs, this adds up quickly.

I think about watch­ing my lovely daugh­ter, Gen Y through and through, sit­ting in front of the tele­vi­sion, chatting/listening/looking up tat­too designs, while tex­ting on her phone, and osten­si­bly keep­ing track of the con­vo­luted plot line of Lost(3).

I am not say­ing that this ruins us as human beings, not at all. We’ve proven our adapt­abil­ity and mirac­u­lous natures over and over again, and we still find ways of keep­ing all our shit together. But I won­der if we– all of us beneath the enfilade (self-imposed, or no)- might be more, with the ancient art of focus.

Lord, some­times I sound just like some­one I never thought I’d be, when I was younger.