David Hoppe

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:: Multitasking and meaning

What works, what seems to

By David Hoppe

When my son was in middle school, one of his teachers began the school year with a speech she made to all her students and their parents. This was back in the mid 1990s, before there was YouTube or Twitter. Cell phones had yet to become part of the human anatomy.

I don't think there was a name for it yet, but the teacher's speech was about multitasking. Basically, what she said was this: Don't try to do your homework and watch TV at the same time. The teacher said she understood that it could be tempting to have the TV on while one was reading the assigned chapter from To Kill a Mockingbird or doing a little long division, but that, in her experience, this usually ended poorly. "You need to learn how to focus," she said.

Two things happened as the teacher made this speech. Parents nodded their heads and kids rolled their eyes.

Although what the teacher was saying seemed perfectly obvious to most of the adults in the room, navigating in a multi-media environment was already old hat as far as most of our kids were concerned. It wasn't unusual for my wife and I to find our son laughing along to Kramer's antics on Seinfeld while reading about the Code of Hammurabi, say, or the Monroe Doctrine. What's more, his schoolwork didn't seem to suffer.

It wasn't long before we started seeing articles by various people purporting to be experts saying, in effect, that our kids were different from us. Where we had been conditioned to pay attention to one thing at a time, exposure to more and ever-present media had effectively wired our kids' brains to be more elastic. According to this theory, reading and watching TV at the same time was practically second nature to them.

That was then. It seems researchers are now having second thoughts about multitasking. A recent Stanford University study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that chronic media multitaskers aren't really good at anything they do. "Heavy multitaskers are lousy at multitasking," said Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass. "The more you do it, the worse you get."

According to the Stanford study, media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention and organizing information. They also have a harder time ignoring irrelevant information.

Yet, the researchers also point out that media multitasking is becoming more and more widespread in workplaces. This is certainly true in journalism. Today, before sallying forth to cover that waterworks meeting, reporters are advised to carry not just a pen and pad, but a digital voice recorder and cameras for still shots and video. This way, the story of what's happening to your water rates can be posted not just as a print story, but as an audio podcast and a video to be listened to and viewed via a web site.

This sounds easy enough. The portability of new technologies makes it seem like every individual is just a few clicks away from being their own multitasking media octopus. But, as the Stanford research suggests, this may miss a larger point.

Writing a story that makes sense - like shooting a video that shows something worth seeing or, for that matter, conducting an interview that gets past talking points, takes practice and concentration. A reporter who's more involved with his tools than with the subject he's supposed to be covering will bring back something that resembles news. But whether it means anything, is another matter.

Artists working with digital media have been previewing this situation for us for some time. Their tools are constantly evolving, with each new operating system providing an amped up Wow! factor. Their fascination with new tools is understandable. It's a reflection of who we are becoming. But what looks incredibly cool today is likely to appear obsolete five years from now.

Where an artist might once have spent a lifetime learning to master paint (and some still do), artists working with a digital palette have to keep up with tools that are constantly changing. This also affects how we relate to what they do. Eavesdrop in a gallery today and you're more likely to hear people asking an artist about how a certain effect was created than what it means.

The Stanford study on multitasking was all about performance. It didn't mention meaning. But isn't meaning the bulls-eye at which our performance should be aimed? Before there was YouTube, before there was Twitter, author Franz Kafka wrote about the soul-eating effect that sets in when performance is stripped of meaning. A word, "Kafkaesque," was coined to describe this condition.

Or, as my son's middle school teacher might have said: "Focus!"