Digital Crosstalk

Internet Distraction – or Multitasking?

Posted by Brian | Filed under blogging

Recent discussions this month have been focusing on the dubious productivity of internet distraction. Recent discussions this month have also been focusing on the dubious productivity of internet multi-tasking. Now, these two are related… but how? Could they be different words describing pretty much the same thing? Two secs while I check Facebook and I’ll be right with you.

Okay. The concern with both internet distraction and multi-tasking is that they’re affecting our lives in a negative way. Both terms apply to different age groups, though, which might actually explain a few things. ‘Distraction’ has been used by adults who find themselves browsing the net at work instead of doing worky things. ‘Multi-tasking’ applies to teenagers who browse the net at home or school while doing their (home) worky things. So what’s the difference?

Not much, it seems, except that kids are better at it than adults are. It transpires that teenagers are managing to do their work and focus on umpteen internet distractions, such as email, IM and social networking sites, whereas adults tend to get stuck in the ‘Wikipedia trap’ – you click on something, then something else, then something else, and suddenly it’s time to go home. Thanks a lot, YouTube.

But what’s the big issue? Well, concerning kids, the growing worry is that the age of multi-tasking means they’ll develop poor concentration skills, meaning children will be ill-equipped for dealing in the workplace in the future. Mike Elgan seems to think the future generations in the office setting will fail miserably at completing tasks thanks to constant technological distraction.

Hang on, I thought adults suffered from this problem already? And if kids are supposedly better at continuing to produce completed work while plugged in to the net, surely they can carry this skill into the workplace and actually cope better than today’s office workers. Elgan, however, goes on to compare the effect of the technological abundance on today’s youth to what happened to America’s waistline when junk food became more readily available and advertised than anything else. Hmm.

But it’s not as if they’re going to be any worse off than current office workers, are they? Paul Graham’s rather long article about his battle with internet procrastination could perhaps be seen as a product of that precise demon itself, so it doesn’t appear as if the current ‘multi-tasking’ generation are heading in quite the same direction as some might envision.

The main problem with multi-tasking isn’t what effect it could bring to the workplace. By all means, this effect could actually be good! But by spending hours a day focusing on email, IM, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, SMS, TV, Wikipedia, web forums and homework, the ‘hyper-kinetic’ mind of teens doesn’t leave room for much non-electronic input – including physical interaction with family and friends. An ongoing four-year anthropological study has discovered the real ill-effect of the current youth generation’s technological immersion, and that is a vastly reduced level of communication with friends, and family in particular. It’s not uncommon for parents to find themselves completely shut out of their child’s online universe, lost amongst the vast amounts of Internet programmes that they have no knowledge about. A sad story but, to be fair, it kind of sounds like teenagers of any generation, doesn’t it?

Ah well. Maybe this is just a wait-and-see scenario. Whether this generation’s band of techno-kids turn into the next bunch of distracted employees or end up putting their multi-tasking skills to use and the office becomes more productive than ever, it’ll probably never get so bad that people actually just stop talking in the middle of a

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Tags: digital