Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age | 
 enlarge | Author: Maggie Jackson
Creator: Bill Mckibben
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 1004
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 327
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1591026237
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.0973
EAN: 9781591026235
ASIN: 1591026237
Publication Date: June 4, 2008
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Book Description
Foreword by Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben Reader We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at online headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never before, but we communicate even with our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur with electronic interruptions and a lack of focus.
Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing--attention. Attention is the key to recapturing our ability to reconnect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world that isn't going to slow down or get simpler. Attention can keep us grounded and focused--not diffused and fragmented.
Distracted offers the cutting-edge solutions we need to cure--not just live with--an epidemic of inattention. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse--in bed? At a time when we can contact millions of people worldwide, why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it?
Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses, skimming, McThinking, and mistrust.
Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity, and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. She investigates the science of attention--describing some of the exciting new scientific research that shows how attention skills can be nurtured.
Taking us beyond Blink, Faster, and CrazyBusy, Distraction is unique. It's simultaneously an original expose of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of postmodern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 A Product Of The Distracted Culture It Describes July 17, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Sadly, DISTRACTED is a product of the culture it describes. The book is perfect for the easily distracted, skimming reader. In a word, it's shallow. If you're looking for something to powerfully address this important topic, something to fire up your neurons and take you deep -- this is not your book. Advice to all: get it through your local library.
The topics addressed in DISTRACTED are far better addressed in THE ATLANTIC's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" "Stoopid" is well organized, researched and written. It has a thesis. More: after reading it you may change your habits. DISTRACTED just leaves you hungry.
Disappointed. Felt like I'd wasted valuable time reading it closely.
Kirtland Peterson
 Absolutely true July 8, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book could not have come at a better time in our lives! Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, written by Maggie Jackson, is talking to all of us as, for the most part, we are a society of hyper, type A personalities who live 24 hours a day attached to some kind of technologically produced device that is, apparently, created to make our lives easier . If that were not enough, we have come to realize that, in many cases, we are also addicted to these little gems- be it, a cell phone, the TV or our computers. Never has mankind advanced (are we really advancing?) so quickly, in such a short time span.
This book takes a fascinating and frightening look at our need for constant distraction and what it is doing to us as humans. Why do we feel such a strong need (pull?) towards anything that will remove us from focusing, meditating and basically living in the now?. The author, Maggie Jackson, argues that we must be in a constant state of distraction - that we are incapable of sitting still and paying attention. In fact, as we go this is becoming more and more of an issue - and is actually removing our humanity from us. We seem to have a need to be surrounded by "noise". As I was reading, I found myself nodding my head "yes" on more than one occasion.
This book is a little scary as it reflects a good chunk of what I have been thinking in the last few years. I, myself, am afraid of the world that I live in at times and have said that we suffer from "too much information", "too much choice" and basically just "too much". It is depressing and it appears as though we are may very well be heading into a very bleak direction. Although I am not certain that I would refer to is as a "coming dark age", as the author calls it, I think we certainly need to slow down and start smelling the roses again - oh wait! we can just go on the Net and pull up a picture of one instead!!!!
This book is extremely well researched and informative - while I did not always like what Jackson was stating, I believe that she was entirely correct in stating it.
( By the way, I do see the irony of what I am writing here - or more precisely, the manner in which I am writing it and transmitting it.)
 Losing Focus Fast July 8, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Impressive is not strong enough. Vast, in-depth, challenging, thorough, detailed and triumphant may describe it better. Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age is a tightly written treatise on the state of American culture in the Technological Age. Where has our attention gone? According to Ms. Jackson, it has seeped into blue split-screen living with a dash of nomadic transience. We're skimming the surface of our lives like a dragon fly on a pond with dripless, crustless, tasteless food, shattered conversation, and information overload. Intensity has escaped us. We lead a vacuum-packed existence.
The book claims we are quickly losing the capability of deep thinking. It may sound radical, but consider how much we read (on the Web) and how little we retain. Fragmented scraps of data float in our brains with little cohesion. We task-switch without concentration, making more errors than if we were to refrain from juggling.
Thinking the book might focus solely on the Internet itself, I was pleasantly surprised to see the breadth of Ms. Jackson's treatment of our collective attention deficit disorder. Quoting Nietzsche, William James and Derrida, Ms. Jackson delves into the treasure trove of philosophy to explain how we've gotten into the state we're in. Satisfyingly academic, her book requires attention and commitment to slog through the text without the culturally threatening distraction she bemoans.
If you're looking for a guide on modern living, you won't find it here. Distracted is a lovely compilation of ideas sewn seamlessly together by anecdotes and academia. It made me miss the penetrating hum of the overhead lights in my cubicle at Smith College so many years ago. It was the only distraction we had. My daughter's generation is challenged by the ring-tone culture that leapfrogs our focus from one thing to the other without thought.
Thankfully, Ms. Jackson has offered us an eye-opening discourse, torch in hand, illuminating the darkening walls as we edge closer to the light.
Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff and Sahm I Am: Tales of a Stay-at-Home Mom in Europe, lives near Munich, Germany with her husband and two children.
 America: Land of the ADHD, Home of the Rave. July 7, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Before I begin, permit me to share the fact that I myself have extraordinary difficulty focusing and/or concentrating. When I was a child (the son of a teacher), I was assessed by the school psychologist as being a 'bright underachiever', since my academic performance level was not congruent with expectations based upon my assessed IQ. Of course in those days (1950s) ADHD wasn't even a recognised DSM diagnosis (unlike today, where it seems that almost every 'difficult' child in the classroom is thus labeled and immediately placed on Ritalin HCl). This problem has remained with me throughout my life and although I have achieved success in my academic and subsquent endeavors, the requisite battle to focus and concentrate has for me been continuous and unrelenting. I say this to illustrate the fact that even something as simple as recreational reading is often a major challenge for me; the effort required to read critically is an order of magnitude beyond that.
Despite my own personal challenges in this arena (or perhaps because of them) I have been acutely concerned with the issues delved into in Jackson's book throughout my entire life. Moreover, the broader effects of impaired reflectivity and focal acuity on our society and culture have remained among my chief interests, in my efforts to understand and evaluate the profound failings of our chosen American sociopolitical and economic way of life.
For these reasons, I was immediately attracted to Maggie Jackson's recently released analysis of our attenuated national attention-span. Although I am still `en route' in my read at the present moment, what I have encountered thus far validates my anticipatory interest in the subject of her discourse.
Jackson's book is NOT an easy read, due in part to the immense number of citations and references she has filled it with. Each requires pause for appropriate thought and suitable reflection, a task that tends to interfere somewhat with the flow of her greater thesis. That having been said, Jackson gives ample evidence of being an extremely thoughtful and intelligent individual, for although a bit circumlocuitous and tangential in her (highly) intellectual arguments, she provides impressive substance in the development of her primary contention.
As someone who has been about as near an out and out pseudo-Luddite as a technowonk may comfortably be in the course of my professional involvement with aeromedical technology, I am nevertheless acutely aware of the highly deleterious effects America's technocratic obsessiveness has had on our culture's sense of collective spiritual awareness and sense of human identity. In our enthusiastic and largely unqualified embrace of all things technological, we have consistently failed to maintain parity with those critically important inner qualities of reflective intelligence and qualitative empathetic awareness that so distinctly set us apart as sentient beings. The bitter Jekel/Hyde irony of our American 'more is better' ethic stands revealed in Jackson's book to actually be 'more is less', by virtue of her near-surgical dissection of the means by which our psycho-physical senses are being progressively overwhelmed by too much sensory input, excessive information, and too many nonessential distractions. A matter of spiritual and intellectual social impoverishment, directly attributable to an embarrassment of scientific and technological riches, if you will.
One point that Jackson deftly manages to avoid making (let me qualify that with the thought that I'm only on page 217 of her 327 page book to date, so she may well still have alluded to it) is that our own basic national economic philosophy (capitalistic materialism) appears to be one of the principal culprits contributing to our collective ADHD, since grossly overemphasised 'lowest common denominator' commercial advertising drives much of our descent into distractiveness. The dogma of modern advertising doctrine employs methods and principles deliberately contrived to and aimed at exploiting our instinctual neuro-biological defenses against threat, and it is often this dynamic that augments distractibility on the part of individuals who are already suffering from intolerable sensory assault throughout our 'go-go-go' culture. It is a commonly acknowledged principle of commercial advertising that a sound-bite type pace (that leaves no time for reflective thought) in visual media advertising is most effective in selling `things' to viewers, since the message is effectively retained, uncomplicated by any temporal possibility for cogent dissent or reflective consideration. Thus `distractivity' is actually cultivated and effectively employed by corporate business in the media marketplace--a practice that has the most dire and far-reachingly harmful consequences in terms of discouraging balanced thought and rational analysis on the part of the public.
As a person who was brought up and educated before the microprocessor revolution burst upon us, I and others of my generation are perhaps more able to understand how technology has transmogrified from its simple archetypal form (of being a tool) into an icon of worshipful, near-religious significance. Having learned from books, rather than by television (we did not have one in my childhood home, by choice) or computer, I am far more wary of the deus ex machine potential implicit in technology than those in later generations perhaps might be. While I recognise science and technology as extremely useful resources to draw upon and employ as needed, I am not unmindful of the threat they pose to virtually every aspect of our most basic spirituality and physical health concerns. Hopefully maturity prepares us more adequately to perform that important process of reflective differentiation and it is therefore that younger segment of the population that is theoretically (I say this mindful of how arguable this statement actually is) still not yet fully intellectually maturated (those under the age of 25 or so) who are most susceptible to the cold and calculating predation practiced by these forces of commercially gainful distractivity.
Drawing tangentially from Rick Shenkman's recent book, `Just How Stupid Are We?', it isn't so much that younger people today are stupid (and unaware of these effects), as much as it likely that they are so profoundly repulsed by the evidence that us `older/wiser' (i.e. mature?) members of society have reduced virtually every aspect of American life to its most vapidly empty level of greed-associated profit/loss that they actively choose escape into trivial diversion over thoughtful concern with serious issues. That `easy way out' dovetails nicely with the market forces of American capitalism to produce endless trivial distractions (all highly profitable) that discourage reflectivity and rational repose on the part of those who buy into this insidiously endless cycle of self-gratifying escapism.
This book is a delight for those among us who are gratified to stumble upon hard documentation of basic assumptions and intuited understandings we have formulated within ourselves from simple observation of human behavior, and Jackson's research and references are meticulous, illuminating, and well worthy of the not-insubstantial effort required (by someone like myself) to absorb and ruminate upon all that lovely data she presents therein.
Perhaps one of the best dustcover blurbs employed to describe this book succinctly comes from Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who states: `Maggie Jackson's fascinating book on America's collective attention deficit disorder is a wake-up call to all of us to take back our lives, turn off the technology, and focus on paying attention to what makes us human and fulfilled." Well spoken, Rosabeth!
PS: This book from Prometheus Books may well temp you to silently steal back to the Mount Olympus of ancient Greek myth to return the `fire' that Zeus (perhaps wisely) chose to keep hidden from mankind!
Now, Readers, Please Pay...Uh...Attention! July 1, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
There is little doubt that over the past few decades, particularly during what has been referred to as "the computer age," the world of intellectual activity has substantially changed. So-called "multitasking" has become common. "Sound-bites" provide many people with all the news they get. Rapid-moving video games provide many with most of the entertainment they experience. The technology of "virtual" reality is becoming so "real" it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what is "actually real" from what is "virtually real." Add to all this the reports that attention deficit symdrome (ADD) and hyperactive behavior among the young are growing problems in our fast-moving society, and one might be tempted to conclude that we are, in fact, "distracted" to the point where the erosion of attention will result in a soon-to-occur "dark age."
This latter point, of course, is a paraphrase of the title of Maggie Jackson's latest book "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age." The major problem we face now, Jackson seems to say, is INATTENTION; that is, we are no longer engaging in such activities as reflection, searching for deeper meanings, taking time to relax and participate in traditionally intimate conversations, getting to know people in a personable way, taking the time to discern the really important from the merely transitory, and so on. We as a society and as individuals are, in other words, not paying ATTENTION. At least to the things we ought to be paying proper attention to.
In her book, Jackson provides a historical survey of the problem, cites a lot of research drawn from a wide range of scholarly fields including empirical science and philosophy, and provides quotations from a diverse population of thinkers who have considered aspects of the main problem she addresses. There is a lot of detail here to be digested; the reader, hopefully, is not suffering from the very problem the author discusses.
One may argue, however, as to whether the current situation will lead to a genuine "dark age." Some might say that that suggestion might be just a little bit hyperbolic. Nevertheless, the author does raise some interesting questions and attempts to provide some workable solutions. So, in this period of constant motion, multitasking, social networking, instant messaging, and electronic overload, it might just be worthwhile for everyone to slow down a little, sit back and relax, read this book, and pay ATTENTION to what Jackson is saying.
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