Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

by Maggie Jackson, Bill McKibben (Foreword)

In this gripping expose of our cyber-centric, attention-deficient life, journalist Maggie Jackson argues that we are eroding our capacity for deep attention and mindfulness - the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. The implications for a healthy society are stark.Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion and detachment. With our attention scattered among the beeps and pings of a push-button world, we are less and less able to pause, reflect, and deeply connect.In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its losses, Jackson introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, and even roboticists. She offers us a compelling wake-up call, an adventure story, and reasons for hope.As the author shows, neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness, and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload.Pull over, hit the pause button, and prepare for an eye-opening journey. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Technology, Sociology, Cultural, Business, Internet

327 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2008

Reviews

[Brian Ayres · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book because the premise is a verification of what I experience daily as a high school teacher. Students, and teachers for that matter, cannot seem to maintain proper attention to grasp key concepts. Maggie Jackson sets out to explain why attention is important to memory, which in turn provides all of us with a sense of self, and success in life. However, she delivers a choppy book filled with vignettes of our modern day multitasking but fails to show how this might lead us into a second dark ages, which is spelled out in the subtitle.

Like her thesis, which might provide the book a bit of irony, Jackson herself seems distracted, weaving a text from present life to an historical analysis that is designed to show our progression throughout the centuries. Some chapters are good, for example the enlightening view of the rise and fall of the book and how our reading culture has turned from ink to pixels and from depth to breadth. However her multiple-page history of the fork could have been left on the editing floor.

Overall, the reader finds segments of brilliantly-written prose, but the organization is disjointed, and Jackson falls back on her work as a columnist by incorporating too many direct quotes. Rather than making social commentary that is enlightened and lasting, Jackson produces nothing more than journalism-lite on the continuing erosion of our attention spans, which will not allow us to remember her attempt at cultural prediction.

[Jesse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't laugh, but I merely skimmed this book.

I heard Maggie Jackson on a radio interview and was intrigued by her discussion of the apparent diminishing of our attention spans. After my perusal of the book, I determined that the anecdotal nature of her material made for better radio than reading. While trying to give this book a serious read, I wearied quickly of the platitudes regarding the displacement of our attention from such things as books to such things as twitter.

Even more quickly, I got tired of the author's stylistic decision to introduce and interrupt every chapter with incessant anecdotes that I assume the author included in order to create some colorful context for the points she wanted to make. I found these digressions annoyingly distant from her focus. The notes and bibliography suggest this is a scholarly study, but it reads too much like a personal memoir. I want to know what you learned from your meeting with Professor Posner, not what the weather was like when you met him.

This quick example illustrates this aggravating style:

"Back home, Posner settled into a favorite chair, with a mug of coffee and his chocolate-and-black miniature schnauzer, Annie, by his side. Rain pattered on the cone-shaped roof of the simple, octagonal wooden yurt, as I peppered him with questions about what is perhaps the greatest detective story of our time: understanding how the brain--and especially attention--works."

And more like this on every other page. So, yes, I skimmed.

[D]

You know, there are books that are really interesting, you want to read them and see what they have to say, but at the end of the day you just can't bring yourself to actually finish reading it, for whatever reason. Whether it's you're just not in the right frame of mind or you have other things to do or whatever. That's what this book was for me.

I appreciated the message the author was trying to send. I get it. We are one hell of a distracted people because of the technology that we use. That same technology is robbing us of the ability to think and connect deeply because our brain has learned to process information rapidly and move on, not allowing it to sink in at all. I do get it. And I totally agree. But the point that was being made, I don't think, rendered an entire book.

I got I'd say a little less than halfway through it before I just retired the thing. I just felt it really dragged on and belabored the point a little too much. Am I a product of technology in not wanting to delve deeply into what the book had to say? Or what I just plain not interested enough? I'd like to say the latter. It was interesting, just redundant. If you keep firing the same point at me laid out in different sentences, I'm going to start to zone out because I got it the first six times it was said. Let's move it along. I can think on it. Really. I don't need it talked at me over and over and over again.

While I do agree that technology will ultimately destroy us (optimistic, I know), I don't think it's fair to lump a person's disinterest in something as ultimately a product of their inability to think outside of technology. I don't need anyone making excuses for me. While I'm distracted by shiny things, sometimes I'm just not interested because I'm bored by the material. It's allowed and has been happening for eons outside of technology.

So this book doesn't get a rating because I didn't finish it. If you're looking for a good, in-depth view of the effects technology has on society, you'll find it in this book. But it is wordy, it is heavy-handed and it is redundant so beware. Not like I didn't know I would be getting something akin to an essay in this book. I just didn't think it'd be so derivative of itself.

[Jason Ray Carney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, eclectic accont of attention from both a cultural and neurobiological perspective. It is written in both a memoir and journalistic style and surprises with passages of lyrical prose. The general premise is that our resources of attention are being wasted frivolously on new technologies. This dispersal of our attention risks dehumanizing us and bringing about a new "dark age," an age of illiteracy and superficiality. There are several surprising excursions all orbiting this idea of a coming dark age: a brief history of the book, a survey of emerging artificial intelligences and social robots, a visit to a Buddhist meditation retreat, an analysis of surveillance technology, and more. It's similar to Winifred Gallagher's *Rapt,* and Nicholas Carr's *The Shallows* (all of these books celebrate attention and warn about its decline today). Of the three, Jackson incorporates the most philosophy and academic theory, and so it read as intellectually ambitious. One quibble: I felt like it ended abruptly. I wanted some sort of call to change or manifesto of renewed attention!

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting idea with poor execution. The examples were all over the place and there were no concrete ideas for overcoming the myriad of problems presented. The fact that it's 8+ years old didn't help either, as many of the "futuristic" ideas presented are realities today. My book club agreed that this book would have been much better as a short essay.

It's getting two stars from me only because it lead it a really great book club discussion.

[Dan Tasse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Argh! Disappointing. I wanted to read a lot about attention, and this book seemed to be about that, but it mostly isn't. There are about 1.5 chapters (out of 9) actually on attention. Chapter 9 is the good one; chapter 3 is all right too. They're about: 1. history of attention or something, 2. World of Warcraft being weird, 3. multitasking (but nothing new), 4. being on the go, 5. surveillance, 6. history of books, 7. affective robots and cyborgs, 8. memory and willpower, 9. attention and how she sweats Mike Posner pretty hard.

Oh, and there's a lot of doomsaying about "the coming dark age." Ugh.

One star might be harsh; it's not a bad read, and if there weren't other books like it, it'd be a fine intro to a lot of issues. I rate it so low because there are other drop-in replacements that you should read instead.

If you want doomsaying about everything technological, read To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov) - he has more good points, and at least it'll make you angry, which is better than confused. If you're interested in calm, thoughtful writing with some good points, read The Shallows (Carr) for more history of books, or The Distraction Addiction (Pang) for more about multitasking, attention, and meditation.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of this book ended up being more than a little prophetic for me, as I found myself almost endlessly distracted from reading it. While it did, in fact, include a lot of interesting information about the levels of distraction in our current culture, and recent findings of neuro-psychology about attention, I simply found the book to be difficult to get into. I'm not sure who the intended audience was for this book, but if it was written for a general audience, then the language used is probably a bit to academic for it to be readily accessible.

In spite of the difficulty I had in finding the motivations to plow through this book (which may also have been the result of poor timing, with the Covid-19 pandemic erupting onto the global stage as I read this), I was still intrigued enough by the content to not give up on the book. I definitely learned some new things, and there is certainly plenty of food for thought here. However, while the author indicates that she would show that the distraction that is so prevalent in our society today will lead to a new dark age, I'm not sure that the body of the book fully supports this assertion. While it certainly seems that that could be possible, I don't think that it is as necessarily inevitable as the author suggests. Since she doesn't really back up that assertion in the rest of the book, I would have to say that she hasn't quite succeeded in making her case.

[CanadianReader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aside from alerting the reader to the names of some psychologists working in the field of attention and multi-tasking, this book has little to recommend itself to a reader who believes he is in for a reasoned consideration of the erosion of attention in our society. The author has clearly done a lot of research, but many chapters read as mash-ups of other people's ideas--and many of these ideas are not clearly related to the problem of distraction at all. In one paragraph alone, I counted quotations from five different researchers/commentators and/or academics.

About halfway through the book, the author seems to have more or less abandoned her stated topic (the erosion of attention), turning instead to ennumerate the collective losses within a "distracted" culture. Among them she identifies the loss of trust (attributed to the explosion of surveillance technology), the loss of deep thinking (due to the volume of information on the internet), and the loss of connection to ourselves (due to our tendency to anthropomorphize robots). There are sections that consider our "neo-nomadic" life style, "fast" hand-held non-messy food, fMRIs of the reading brain--complete with neuroanatomical terms, and the history of book making. A notably baffling section addressed cartography--which I was hard pressed to find connected with the topic of the book in any significant way.

The fact that many of the individuals interviewed or commented upon hardly seem representative of the general population--e.g. a snack food executive who constantly travels or a couple who monitor their young child's move from crib to bed with a surveillance camera--made Jackson's conclusions seem suspect.

Initially, Jackson seemed to want to place the "dark age" that might be coming within a historical context, but throughout the book, she did little to define or clarify what she meant by that term, or how the ennumerated losses contributed to the darkness. In the end, the text is not a reflection on distraction as much as a meandering set of ruminations, some of them far less clear than others, on what technology might be doing to us. It is too allusive, too rambling, and too packed with quotations.

I spent a great deal of time--too much, I now realize--trying to figure out what Jackson was getting at. If you must read this, get a library copy. But better advice would be to pass on this one completely.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age is a 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, & information overload. Intensity has escaped us.

The main topic of the book then is: fragmented attention & the deterioration of sustained attention in modern life.

In the book the author claims we are quickly losing the capability of deep thinking. Consider how much we read (on the Web) & how little we retain. Fragmented scraps of data float in our brains with little cohesion.

This topic (& related issues) interests me in that I see a direct connection between this & a weakening of the Church in America. Not just the Church but individual Christians. We are unable to pay attention to the Bible, to simply reading it, much less being able to think about it. Maggie Jackson powerfully argues that we are living in a world of distractions so pervasive that our capacity to sustain attention & indulge in deep, uninterrupted thought is being seriously hindered. She has hit the nail on the head as this is exactly what the Christian is called upon to do daily in the Christian life. These are important keys to growth & maturity & a great deal of all our modern technical devices that supposed are designed to help us are killing us spiritually.

I find it interesting that Jackson explains that she didn't set out to write about attention, but rather was "curious as to why so many Americans are deeply dissatisfied with life." This dissatisfaction is rampant among Christians, who, I believe should not, on the whole, experience this.

The author fears that we are becoming increasingly dehumanized & lost by the "merging between man & machine.” This is a huge problem & one that Christians are having a difficult time addressing. It is a physical, emotional discipline problem that has profound effects on our spiritual condition & our relationship with God.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

My son, Aaron, recommended this book. It addresses the negative effect of technology on attention, focus, memory, judgment, and most significantly, reading. Here are a few nuggets:

The real question going forward is how we read, for in this explosively information-laden world, reading -- whether reading a book or scrolling a screen -- lies at the crux of our ability to perceive and make sense of the world.

This miraculous cultural invention [reading], a feat so unnatural that it necessitates a painstaking rewiring of the brain to learn, shapes our understanding of life.

Done well, reading gives us a deeply meaningful framework for living. Apart from love, it is our only vehicle for attaining "secular transcendence," argues critic Harold Bloom. Done poorly, no matter what we read, we are marooned on the surface of sense-making, eternally adrift..."

By what means will we continue to be creative readers instead of passive viewers?" (159).

The essence of reading, after all, is going beyond the surface.(168).

"The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge" (166, quoted from Daniel Boorstin's Cleopatra's Nose: essays on the Unexpected, 1994).

...nearly 57 percent of Americans don't read a single book a year" (155).

One must be an inventor to read well (Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why).

An accessible, fairly quick read.

[MilwaukeeWoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book and felt much of it is accurate yet I don't seem to have internalized Maggie Jackson's concerns of an impending dark age. If science consistently finds that multitasking leads to lowered worker productivity, businesses will find ways of abandoning it. I'm not saying I believe in the economic liberal ideal that says that businesses always choose to do the right thing because of the Invisible Hand, I believe that this is more along the lines of Taylorism. Businesses spend loads of money figuring out how to "lean" their processes, and it won't take much more of this fragmented way of living for managers to figure out that we need to schedule our days so that we're not trying to answer email while we're on the phone and trying to complete some forms. My faith in this is further supported by the fact that as far as I know, even managers don't want to work that way.

As far as our personal lives go, I think it's too early to tell. The generations raised with a smart phone as part of their personal kit are not yet here.

Or maybe I'm wrong and we're all doomed to be surrounded by people whose only knowledge comes from YouTube videos.

[Connie Mayo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept thinking that my review of this book would start along the lines of, "I wanted to finish it but I was just too... distracted". (I did actually finish it, though.) Yes, I am a skimmer when things don't hold my interest, but because of that I was REALLY interested in this subject matter. But I tried and tried to stay focused and it was really hard. Part of it was the language which I found unnecessarily high brow, like "the context of our sense-making is as important as the form of the text and the force of our will." Huh? I think this book is not for Everyman, though it makes some good points and brings to light many interesting bits of research in the field. But like many doom-and-gloom nonfiction books, really nothing is spent on solutions. The book literally ends with the sentences, "Will we cultivate a renaissance of attention? The choice is ours." Uh, but HOW? Don't leave me hanging like that! Especially since I can't focus on anything for very long! Wait, what was the problem again? :)

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt guilty for skimming this book, only to find out that pretty much no one in my book club liked it either. In fact, the person who suggested it and led the discussion gave up on it.

We agreed that the topic was intriguing but the book wasn't what we expected. It would have been more successful as an article or long-form magazine piece. It was too unfocused; we joked that we were distracted by the writing.

The chapter about robots turned me off. I read some of it to my husband, who works in the field. All the experts Jackson quoted were in the Boston area, particularly MIT, which tends to over-hype themselves. She didn't do her due diligence.

It didn't help that the book is now outdated.

[Sharon Wasserman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't even finish this--I kept getting distracted :) Seriously, I heard the author on the radio and I don't think the book added too much to what I already heard. I guess I'm also already tired of this subject though I agree with much of what the author says.

[Monica Laurette · Rating 2 out of 5]

While looking at the other lower star reviews I had thought to myself 'but why do you want her to solve all your problems for you?' This I still hold dear, but I just didn't like the book.

I have read too many things talking about how my generation is going to bring civilization down for our advancements and love of technology, and to me, this book seemed like mainly an attack on social media and how we use it. Yes, there were some wonderful hints and tips on problems, and since there are no solutions, this means you must look out and find them for yourself, and personalize them for your needs.

However, I just couldn't get over the fact that Maggie Jackson was seeming to attack social media, though she never outright says it. I am just too used to defending it I guess. Maybe another read-through is what I need, but I will not be doing that. I understand the problems, I see them, but I don't think that they are as dire as the author makes them seem. Maybe to her generations eyes, they are, but to mine, they are smaller, and maybe that's the point she was trying to make. I don't know, it'll all be in hindsight if it does come to a new dark age.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jackson brings together some interesting research in this book, much of it from Sherrie Terkel, another author I have enjoyed. The writing is generally accessible and engaging, and I enjoyed the vignettes of interviewees that Jackson provides. Rather alarmist tone of the cover and title doesn't really persist within the text, and I consider that a positive. The main shortcoming I felt, ironically, was a lack of a strong central thesis. The book seems to lurch from one area to another of the research on attention, empathy, focus, etc. Jackson at several points seems to drop her idea of a coming dark age entirely, instead just raising questions about how our new technologies and our interactions with them will impact us in our development as a species. At some points she seems to remember that every generation thinks that the next generation will ruin civilization, but at others, she seems more judgmental of the differences she notes. I'd only recommend this book for people with particular interests in sociology, futurism, or technology; it just doesn't seem pitched to the general market.

[Marcos Junior · Rating 3 out of 5]

O mundo de hoje nos traz um grande problema, a cultura da distração. A tecnologia e velocidade dos dias de hoje fez erodir nossa atenção, com profundas consquências para a humanidade. A vigilância eletrônica destrói a confiança entre as pessoas, a pesquisa fragmentada pela internet, cheia de links, nos impede pensar em profundidade pois nos contenta com a primeira informação que recebemos, o que ocorre com facilidade. Por fim, o desenvolvimento da inteligência artificial levando a robôs humanizados nos afasta uns dos outros prejudicando a conexão entre as pessoas.

O antídoto para tudo isso é o renascimento da atenção, esta habilidade que nos leva a ter foco, pensar com clareza e ter unidade em nossa vida. Esta é a grande encruzilhada que o homem de hoje se encontra: nos contentaremos com a distração que vivemos ou promoveremos o retorno da atenção?

[Todd Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is okay. On the positive the author uses, metaphors, a stream of thought, and many literature references. Ms. Jackson takes the reader on her journey of discovery of the moment with all the distractions of modern day. You get exposed to some good conversations by thought leaders in the field. I sought the book as it was referenced in another book. However, this narrative is less than I expected. It is dense. It is a beautiful stream of thought, well referenced, and great use of words and shares. But, at it end I don’t feel I gained anything more than the human mind is not well designed for multitasking. The only exception is the mix of activity and think. For example it might be okay if you are walking and talking, listening, or writing. However, all other efforts should cease.

[Mel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got this book for a library school essay; it's not the type of thing I normally read! The book could easily have been subtitled "what's wrong with American society". I think the book the author was trying to write though was what's wrong with Americans. Her premise seemed to be because Americans spent too much time multi-tasking and distracted their culture was doomed and going to die unless people started learning how to focus, and (unsurprisingly) one way was Buddhism's mindfulness! She spent a lot of time talking about the "neuroscience" of what happened to a person's brain in these different situations, and how this was bad, and how increasing concentration was good. Of course she's an author and journalist without a background in neuroscience and, as someone with only a degree in psychology, what she was saying didn't make any sense. She'd try to explain brain processes, but then not say what that actually corresponded to. Not to mention the problems she was discussing were cultural phenomena, and so needed a cultural answer, not an individual one. I did think the book started fairly well. It was an enjoyable criticism of the way modern society works. How we spend all our time doing many things at once, and how everything seems to be dummed down. My favourite part was when she had a 10 year old talk about how they liked using power point because it was easier to write without any detail and you didn't have to know what you were talking about. She compared the innovations of today's society with that of Victorian times, and made some nice comparisons between the two (partly unintentionally explaining the interest in steam punk amongst modern geeks). However, sayings how society today was like society in the 19th century didn’t really further her argument that there would be a coming cultural dark age. In fact she did little to justify this at all, mostly just pointing out how bad things were. She also failed to address how a dark age of American society would be affected by the fact that we are now living in a global society, or how many of the problems she was talking about could be found in other cultures. This was obviously a book designed by an American, for Americans, with little consciousness of the outside world, except when European history was needed. After the first few chapters focusing on technology, and how families spend no time together anymore, there was a chapter on the evils of fast food, in particular drive throughs, and "nomadism" the fact that people spend lots of time travelling everywhere (particularly be plane). I found this chapter the most irritating. It seemed to make no judgement for class or economic status. I wasn't sure how eating out all the time impacted a distracted state, rather than simply an unhealthy one. And I really don't think most Americans spend all their time on airplanes travelling back and forth for business and pleasure. (Of course when talking about how this was bad the environmental impact was not mentioned once). The "evils" of technology chapters were quite strange too. The first talked about how parents used technology to spy on their kids. Putting up cameras in their rooms to record them, which I found really creepy. The other example was a guy who banned his 12 year old son from the internet for a year, because the dad thought one of his son's friends might be a paedophile in disguise. This struck me as SUCH bad parenting. You don't ban a kid because you think he might be in trouble, you explain the dangers to them and educate them so they can make better decisions. He then put in parental spyware on the computer so he could ban all sites that he didn't think were appropriate for his son including ones "with heavy metal music" (dear gods!) The other part was talking about how AI and robotics were being developed. She seemed offended that the idea that robotic animals could be used as surrogates for actual relationships, or to build empathy. As many pop-cultural references as she made, the fact that she neglected to talk about the exact use of the robot pets to build empathy in Do Androids dream seemed quite odd. Her point seemed to be that we liked robots, or identified with them too much, and that was bad. (Though if sci-fi has taught us anything it's that not liking the robots and treating them poorly is what leads to rebellion). While complaining about how kids were getting dumber and the lack of good education she was scathingly critical of attempts by universities and university libraries to increase information literacy (how people are taught research skills). She dismissed this out of hand as being outdated, similarly to her dismissal of teaching critical thinking. When surely teaching critical thinking and information literacy skills are exactly the two solutions to fix the problems of attention and ignorance that she is complaining about (travel and fast food would need a different approach). (228 179 and 163) It wasn't a totally bad read, the style was engaging and she quoted from all sorts of people that I liked and enjoy reading. But I felt that her overall arguments were flawed and her solution to the problems presented was inappropriate. Still there were some good quotes to include in my essay so it was worth reading.

[Shana Market · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is less about information regarding distraction and/or how to prevent it and more of gathering of stories about different psychologists and others who have studied distraction. It talks a lot about how, in our generation, we are distracted (naming phones, computers, etc.) The last 30 pages or so talk about attention. I had a hard time staying with this book.

[Arlingtontexican · Rating 1 out of 5]

Failed to catch my attention long enough to finish. We are browsers by necessity. Information overload. Information management. And maybe I haven't thought of the question this author answers.

[Pedro L. Fragoso · Rating 4 out of 5]

This proved surprisingly good. One of the most intriguing concepts explored in the essay is "depth of thinking" -- there certainly is much of this herein. I'm going through a reading list inspired by Neal Stephenson's Anathem and his amazing text on TIME about it (google it, read it, it's mandatory). This is book 4 of 6 of that list (the others, by order of reading, are Lieberman's Social; Boyd's It's Complicated; Carr's The Shallows; Distracted; I've started Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation and will conclude with Carr again, his latest.) So far, the books have been consistently good and well founded, some, like this one, wonderfully written. All in all, extremely worrisome tomes about the state we have put ourselves in as a society, and in the end Stephenson is probably right, the only way out of this mess, Maggie Jackson hopes for a renaissance of attention notwithstanding, being avouts and concents.

Anyway, there is much to really admire in this brilliant reflection. Eminently quotable!

"By its very nature, space is freedom, according to cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, while place is akin to security and permanence. Hence, an inestimable attraction of the aptly named "cyberspace" is its breadth and size, its openness and impermanence. (Death, wrote Shakespeare, is just an 'undiscovered country.')"

"Now we live in societies of control, not discipline, marked by systems with ever-shifting perimeters."

"A panoptic culture teaches our children that we cannot take a chance on others. Unintentionally, such a culture also teaches children that they are to be distrusted, and that we cannot take a chance on them. Cameras, breathalyzers, software monitoring, GPS tracking, and other far-reaching paraphernalia of the eye take away our children's brief chance in life to gradually, with inevitable stumbling, learn to take responsibility for their actions. Surveillance erodes their freedom to fall. "What I always say to parents is if you are giving your kids appropriate freedom, it will feel like neglect in our culture," says psychologist Wendy Mogel."

"But now is the moment to ask ourselves: do we want to build a culture that relies predominantly on skimming? To drift steadily on and on, distracted, across texts, is as much like deep reading, as stockpiling information is akin to acquiring knowledge. To fully understand the rich intricacy of any writing-from the multilayered symbolism of a novel to the nuanced arguments of great nonfiction, we must go deeply into the text. This is an unavoidably laborious, often uncomfortable yet inevitably rewarding process."

"This is the third collective loss, after trust and depth of thinking, that we face in a time of distraction. When we embrace the machine not as a tool but as part of us and as one of us, we begin to lose the inner will and outer means to connect with one another. We risk living in solitary glass cages, enchanted by shadows on the wall." (N.B.: The Glass Cage, about automation, is the title of Nicholas Carr book mentioned above.)

"In contrast, conservative biomedical philosopher Leon Kass argues that enhancements, especially pharmacological, are wrong because they are unnatural and unfair. "Nothing hurts if nothing matters," writes Kass, comparing a future of drug-induced contentment to the stupor enjoyed by denizens of A Brave New World."

"Trust, depth of thought, and finally a certain spirit of humanity begin to be lost. Such changes are harbingers of a wildly inventive, marvelously technological dark age."

"The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."

"Yet most college students graduate still believing that knowledge is just a matter of opinion, in which evidence plays little role, notes Patricia King."

"In adapting to these stunning new experiences of space, time, and place, we are allowing the pillars of our humanly attention to suffer. Focus slides into diffusion, judgment becomes skimming, and awareness slips into detachment. The antidote, of course, is attention. But to cultivate a renaissance of attention, we must understand its workings and have the patience and wisdom to envision its possibilities. 'Everyone knows what attention is,' wrote William James in his 1890 masterwork Principles of Psychology. 'It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects of trains of thoughts.'"

Yes, splendorous depth of thinking, and extremely well written, which doesn't hurt.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Subtitled: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Ironically, I found the book to be very distracted and distracting. It is possible, of course, that I was simply distracted — but I don’t think so. The introduction starts off well with the suggestion that our ability to pay close and deep attention is severely compromised by television, cell phones, instant messaging, hyermobility and the cascade of options offered to us by the consumer culture and that if we lose the ability to pay attention there will be dire cultural and social consequences — that we will be in danger of descending into a dark age. Unfortunately, (and I may have be distracted when I read that section) Jackson never defines what she means exactly by “dark age”; she does mention at some point late in the book that different people have different ways of defining the term but she never plunks down with her definition. The book is well larded with interesting bits and pieces but Jackson never bothers to mention why those bits and pieces are pertinent to her thesis. With a bit of work, the reader could no doubt untangle the connecting thread, but I think Jackson could have done a better job of that. It might also have been useful if she had given the reader a hint about where she was going before she dashed off in yet another direction: “Our reduced ability to pay attention is partly a commitment issue. Many things in our society tend to make us more suspicious and less trusting. Let me illustrate...” In the last chapter she talks about the hope that a dark age might be averted and outlines research being done on training attention and other mental skills. At points she seems to be arguing that the way to cope a splintered and distracting environment is to train your brain to work faster. Getting rid of your TV and cell phone, sitting down with your family for dinner occasionally, taking a walk, slowing down in general — strategies for actually reducing the amount of distraction that one allows into one’s environment — seem to be either impossible or undesirable in her world view.

[Nanako Water · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Distracted" is a riveting read. Several times over the course of the past year, men and women have commented to me about their disappointment in the fast-paced, instant gratification, Tweet-filled nature of our current lives. Children all around me are diagnosed with ADD or other attention-related disorders. I’ve noticed in friends and neighbors more symptoms of autism, Asperger’s and other disabilities related to social attention. So when I read Maggie Jackson’s book: "Distracted, the erosion of attention and the coming Dark Age", a lot of her message resonated with me. I agree with her that never before in history have we had so many marvelous and disturbing distractions. Beautiful, attractive robots with emotions are no longer in the realm of science fiction and while they promise comfort for us, they also threaten to displace real relationships with imperfect, complex human beings. Her many fascinating examples of work on the frontier of neuroscience raises interesting questions. Can we measure higher level thinking and the attention we need to live a better life?
I was especially intrigued by her proposition that a “Dark Age” will soon be upon us if we continue to neglect our ability to focus and think deeply. Although a prediction for a coming end of the world may be too dire for many optimistic Americans to stomach, I wish that Jackson had pursued this line of thought further. Can the lack of attention she sees, or in other words, the impatience we feel be directly connected with the decline in our quality of life? The Prussian obsession with time, order, and specialization (focus) dramatically influenced the 19th century industrialization of our world. Industrialization created massive changes in the lives of almost everyone. Good and bad. How will our current habits of multi-tasking, browsing the internet, and skimming over huge amounts of information bring the Dark Ages into our lives? Jackson must not let us off the hook too easily. I hope that her next book not only captures my attention but that it also sends chills down my spine. This book provided much food for thought and compelled me to rethink many of my current habits.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book... Basically how modern technology is not making us smarter, but stupider - by making us more distracted (Yes Facebook this means you!). People are no longer interested in reading longer books (with real paper) - instead they want to browse or scan the latest headlines or "feeds" on the computer to get what the want, when they want it. We no longer have the necessary attention span to go into anything in-depth any longer.

I've actually read many of the studies cited in this book (erm... online) which point to the growth of ADD/ADHD diagnosis as a symptom of our national lack of attention. In many ways I can see this happening (watching parent's put up a DVD player for their kid in a restaurant to keep them from being bored - God forbid!) or when families no longer have meals together. These are symptoms of disconnected and distracted families. The cellphones, TV's, and various other gadgets can keep us from having meaningful relationships - which is the main point of the book.

Self-discipline, learning when to say no, and where the "off-switch" is, all go a long way in remedying the problems outlined in this book IMHO... :D

[Catherine Gillespie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her book Distracted, author Maggie Jackson investigates how our rapidly shifting cultural orientation to information and decrease in attention could portend the beginnings of a new depression of culture, critical thinking, and standard of living.

Jackson’s idea has some strengths. She did a good job of pointing out that in historical eras later termed “dark ages” people often didn’t know they were in them or didn’t feel an abrupt shift (it’s not like suddenly the lights went out). Jackson reminds us that the European Middle Ages and the Greek Dark Ages were defined by great technological gains, but that those were offset but a general decline in civilization and “a desertlike spell of collective forgetting.” Dark ages are more like a “period of flux” than a sudden plummet.

I thought she could have done a stronger job of analyzing commonalities of “Dark Ages” in the past and viewing current realities in light of those common factors.

{Read my full review here}

[Kitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, but I think it suffers itself somewhat from the disease of distraction. There are many footnotes on each page which pull you away from the text. Because of that it was difficult sometimes to remember what idea the author was trying to explain.

It's a bit of a self-help book too and there's a chapter at the end (not sure if it's the last one but probably) that talks about ways people extend their ability to concentrate and attend to things. She mentioned a then current study of Buddhists and what meditation does for their attention span. She also talked about an artist who spends many hours on a single drawing. I've been doing a few "meditation drawings" as I like to draw but don't have the patience for straight meditation. I thought maybe drawing for an hour or so could be my own form of meditation. We'll see.

I'm glad I read this in spite of my reservations mentioned above. It was interesting and I enjoyed it mostly.

[John Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first part of the book is terrific, positing the tradeoffs of a society that is more connected than ever, yet more unfocused than ever. The fallout is that we're never really able to concentrate because of all the interruptions: cell phones, e-mails, text messaging. "Knowledge work can't be done in sound bites," Jackson says. We are losing the ability to communicate in face-to-face contact. The typical elevator behavior now is not to engage in conversation with other riders but to pull out one's BlackBerry. Of course the book, published in 2008, already is out of date in this age because of the advance of such technology as Twitter and the iPad.
It took a long time for me to finish this book, because I kept getting distracted... and it wasn't that interesting, at least the last two-thirds of it. Here Jackson loses steam, becoming bogged down in minutia and going down ethereal rabbit trails full of unrelated vignettes.

[Whoof · Rating 2 out of 5]

Organization of the book itself makes no sense, but the variety of interview subjects and research topics was cool. Loads of cited works and authors that sound worth checking out. Sadly I don't think the book itself interacts enough with the huge number of sources it cites--things frequently pop up once for a quotation and don't come up again.

Strongest part of the book is easily the interview stories, as the author actually went all over the country talking to a host of interesting people about distraction/focus/attention/multitasking/Buddhism/robots/cartography/etc/etc/etc/. But something about the way the book is organized manages to make these encounters easily forgettable, which is a shame.

The central thesis is kind of ridiculous--Coming dark age? Urf. Clearly there are attentional issues all over but I think the "dark age" stuff is not well argued enough to come off as anything but sensational.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know, I liked this book a lot. The subject matter is one that really interests me because I am trying to become more focused. Another reviewer called this a self-help book. I disagree. It's a more an introductory exploration of a current topic. The anecdotes, stories, and research were intriguing. I found the nonlinear approach to be appropriate, considering the topic and author. The author is a journalist, not an expert. She is a product of this age of distraction and her writing style reflects that. A coworker was really bothered by the nonlinear approach. He also expected the author to offer guidance on how to bring depth and focus to this age. This isn't that sort of book. It is the sort of book that will intrigue you and lead you to other relevant books and articles.