The Grand Unified Theory of Exponentially Sensing Beings
What secret skills do multi-taskers possess? What really, if anything, makes them/us different?
Clifford Nass gave a stimulating and uncommon talk today through Stanford’s Media X program.
Generally a research team will focus on a very narrow question, something they can own, maintain secrecy over, then release the results of extensive research in that vein, effectively positioning themselves as the topical experts of that domain. But Nass and his team seem to be taking a more open, bottom up approach to their research into the psychological underpinnings of “media multitasking”. Nass says that research isn’t generally presented publicly this early on. While they have found some profoundly surprising results in early studies, they are facing a field that is too vast for one team to lay claim to, so, he’s bringing it forward partially in response to public demand (“we need to know if multitasking is bad for our kids”), but partially to invite more and more external specialists into the sphere.
The findings they did present are quite interesting.
Basically there was this assumption that some people are more prone to, or adept at, multitasking. They went out and found a way to quantify this, and gathered a collection of these people. They also found a set of people who were not normally multitasking with media
In short, there was a prevalent idea that multi-tasking was an expression of some hidden cognitive skill (better filtering, sorting, or switching), but it turns out that people who are consuming multiple media channels at once are significantly worse at all three of these types of activities. There was no secret power, there was only an inability to filter, sort, and switch. One conclusion is that media multi-taskers are simply explorers, always on the lookout for something new, while another conclusion might be that multi-taskers are simply running away from boredom, they get bored easily and need to find respite from this. A future fMRI study will try to determine if the impulse to consume unrelated media simultaneously is an aversive (running away from boredom) or an attractive (running towards something you want) impulse, but I’m a little skeptical of this dualistic reduction. Marshall McLuhan saw media as a new extension of the human nervous system. From his perspective, I find it challenging to delineate between aversive and attractive impulses within a unified system. Perhaps with all these remote eyes and ears around the globe connected to our own minds we are transforming previously disparate channels into a new type of unified stream of awareness.
Maybe what seem like unrelated content is simply a value judgement (or a historical prejudice). Perhaps, as experimental art forms try to combine disparate sensory experiences into one cohesive piece, the multi-taskers of today are sucking in content that all relates somehow to our singular world instead of sucking in various disparate unrelated media sources. Perhaps what seem like multiple threads to us now are actually woven into a heretofore unknown type of mesmerizingly unified tapestry of the near future.
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