Currently Happening Presently Now: MULTITASKING

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"What could possibly be harmful about striking a key at the computer? Nothing- unless you do it several thousand times a day."
-Deborah Quilter and Emil Pascarelli, Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer User's Guide, 1994, page 3.

"It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

Rosen, C. (2008). The myth of multitasking. The New Atlantis, 20(Spring), 105-110.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once...

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information...

For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.


Carr, N. (2010). The Juggler's Brain. Phi Delta Kappan, 92(4), 8-8.

In a 2005 interview, the pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich ruminated on the Internet's power to cause not just modest alterations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup. Noting that "our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability," he described the Net as the latest in a series of "modern cultural specializations" that "contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to." He concluded that "our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure". He returned to this theme in a post on his blog in 2008, resorting to capital letters to emphasize his points. "When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains," he wrote, noting that our minds "strengthen specific heavily-exercised processes." While acknowledging that it's now hard to imagine living without the Internet and online tools like the Google search engine, he stressed that "THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES."

Dismukes, R. K., Loukopoulos, L. D., & Barshi, I. (2012). The multitasking myth: Handling complexity in real-world operations. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587.

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

Laff, M. (2007). The myth of multitasking. Train Dev. 2007; 61 (3), 20.

"Assaults upon our attention are decisively important because our consciously directed attention is the only point at which we are fully awake. Attending to something is what it means to be awake to it. And we can only attend in this sense to one thing at a time.

It is true that we can do many things at once. We can talk, drive a car, breathe, and digest food all at the same time. But our waking attention is single and indivisible. We may be able to switch it rapidly from one thing to another, but at any given instant it is consumed by one thing alone...

So why does all this matter? Because the point where we exercise our attention is the point where we manifest our highest capacities. It is the only point where we can gain mastery over technology (or anything else) and the only point where we can deepen understanding. Moreover, if we are not masters of our own attention, we are tools of our surroundings and of our own subconscious...

I am not saying that the many things we 'do' beside paying attention are worthless. It's a good thing the pianist does not have to attend to the movement of his fingers while he is interpreting a sonata. But we need to recognize that the things we do not attend to gain a certain automatic character. They are redeemed as fully human only when they are caught up in a higher attention and made to serve it, as when the pianist's technique serves his current striving for expression. Remove that higher attention, and what is left -- whether it is the movement of fingers on a piano keyboard or on a computer keyboard -- is probably not worth anyone's time.

I realize that these issues are not likely to grip the public's imagination. But this, I guess, is very much as it should be. The important issues today must not grip us, because the vital thing is that we should rouse ourselves to grip them. This requires an initiative on our part -- a self-mastery and a strengthening of our powers of willful attention -- so that we can wrestle with matters of our own choosing despite the continual coercions coming from without.

If, on the other hand, our attention becomes wholly entrained by the mechanisms we have set in motion around us -- for example, by 'what pops up on the screen'-- then we will have disappeared into those mechanisms. This will be true despite our exhilarated feelings of being 'in control' as we shift our attention with executive authority from one interrupt to another within an overall context we have become incapable of questioning."
-Multitasking Ourselves to Death, in NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, Stephen L. Talbott Ed., Issue #75, July 30, 1998.

Dede, C. (2006, March). How mediated immersion shapes learning. In Virtual Reality Conference, 2006 (pp. xiii-xiii). IEEE.

Summary form only given, as follows. Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn: (1) the familiar webpages-and-windows "desktop," (2) multi-user virtual environments (including sensory immersion via virtual reality), and (3) augmented realities based on mobile wireless devices and infused in real world settings. The "millennial" learning styles ascribed to the Net Generation stem primarily from the desktop interface; however, the growing use of virtual environments and augmented realities is fostering new forms of mediated learning in users of all ages. The crucial factor leading to this ??neomillennial?? learning is that the desktop interface is not psychologically immersive, while in contrast virtual environments and augmented realities induce a strong sense of "presence." Psychological immersion enables a powerful pedagogy, situated learning, which is based on authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert mentoring as well as tacit learning through collaborative activities. Through situated learning enabled by psychological presence, virtual environments and augmented realities is shaping participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecom-munications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for education and training.

Anton, C. (2009). Clocks, Synchronization, and the Fate of Leisure: A brief media ecological history of digital technologies. The culture of efficiency: Technology in everyday life, 71-87.

By punctually binding themselves to a machine-paced or automated workplace, people thought that eventually they would be more productive in less time and would have more time for leisure. In fact, people accepted the encroachment of demanded synchronicity in almost all aspects of nonwork life, especially in dinnertime, mass media, and public entertainment. The promise of more leisure time (after work and on weekends) eventually failed. In its place arose more and more forms of scheduling.

De Grazia, S. (1962). Of time, work, and leisure. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.

Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social text, 18(2), 33-58.

In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of "free labor," a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the connections between the "digital economy" and what the Italian autonomists have called the "social factory." The "social factory" describes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine." Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an "unreal," empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large...
The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture.


Scholz, T. (Ed.). (2012). Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory. Routledge.

Digital Labor asks whether life on the internet is mostly work, or play. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment on blogs, we remix media, and we upload video to create much of the content that makes up the web. And large corporations profit on our online activity by tracking our interests, affiliations, and habits—and then collecting and selling the data. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? The international, interdisciplinary contributors to Digital Labor suggest that there is no longer a clear divide between ‘the personal’ and ‘work,’ as every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship—and all become fodder for speculative profit. They argue that we are living in a total labor society and the way in which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered is profoundly and disturbingly normalized by the dominant discourse of digital culture. Digital Labor poses a series of questions about our digital present: How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the hidden labor of the digital economy? How do we address that most online interaction, whether work or play, for profit or not, is taking place on corporate platforms? How can we acknowledge moments of exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment? In response to these questions, this collection offers new definitions of digital labor that address and challenge the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.


Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(2), 230-248.

Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labor developed in the essay is applied to the online economy and the example of interactive TV. The analysis suggests that a critical approach to forms of surveillance facilitated by interactive media must focus on asymmetries of power and control over information technologies and resources...

The productivity of surveillance, for the purposes of this article, can be understood as being always parasitic upon another form of labor...the critical literature on surveillance retain strong overtones of what Foucault describes as the insistence in the West on “seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than technical and positive” (1980, p. 121). This tendency is also reflected in the public debate over on-line privacy, which centers on the “invasion” of privacy and the oppressive surveillance capacity of the state. The emphasis is upon the ways in which disciplinary surveillance creates “docile bodies” and not upon the more suggestive aspect of Foucault’s analysis: the spiraling cycle of productivity incited by disciplinary regimes: the fact that docile bodies are not rendered inert, but stimulated. As Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish (1975/1977): “Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political' force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force” (p. 221). Docility and pacification are certainly among the goals of discipline, but the real power of surveillance is a relentlessly productive and stimulating one...


 


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