Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age » (1st Edition)

Maggie Jackson (New York, NY) is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the popular "Balancing Acts" column in the Boston Globe. Her work also has appeared in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, among other national publications. Her acclaimed first book, What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge.

We have oceans of information at our disposal, yet we increasingly seek knowledge in online headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via e-mail and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled and interrupted a dozen times. 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-the key to recapturing our ability to connect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse-in bed? We can contact millions of people worldwide, so why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it? Distracted vividly shows how day by day, our hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, interrupted lives erode our capacity for deep focus and awareness. The implications for a healthy society are stark.
Attention is the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson makes it clear that if we squander our powers of attention, our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. And yet we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our skills of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. Jackson reveals the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of attention in a world of speed and overload. She offers us a wake-up call, and reasons for hope.
Distracted is an original exposé of the multifaceted nature ofattention, 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. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.

Publishers Weekly

In this richly detailed and passionately argued book, Jackson (What's Happening to Home?) warns that modern society's inability to focus heralds an impending Dark Age-an era historically characterized by the decline of a civilization amid abundance and technological advancement. Jackson posits that "our near-religious allegiance to a constant state of motion" and addiction to multitasking are "eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress" and stunting society's ability to "comprehend what's relevant and permanent." The author provides a lively historical survey of attention, drawing upon philosophy, the impact of scientific innovations and her own experiences to investigate the possible genetic and psychological roots of distraction. While Jackson cites modern virtual life (the social network Facebook and online interactive game Second Life), her research is largely mired in the previous century, and she draws weak parallels between romance via telegraph and online dating, and supernatural spiritualism and a newfound desire to reconnect. Despite the detours (a cultural history of the fork?), Jackson has produced a well-rounded and well-researched account of the travails facing an ADD society and how to reinvigorate a "renaissance of attention." (June)

Foreword 9

Introduction 11

Part I Lengthening Shadows: Exploring Our Landscape of Distraction

Chapter 1 Wired Love ca. 1880-Tracing the Roots of an Attention-Deficient Culture 29

Chapter 2 Focus-E-mailing the Dead and Other Forays into Virtual Living 45

Chapter 3 Judgment-Of Molly's Gaze and Taylor's Watch: Why More Is Less in a Split-Screen World 71

Chapter 4 Awareness-Portable Clocks and Little Black Boxes: The Sticking Point of Mobility 97

Part II Deepening Twilight: Pursuing The Narrowing Path

Chapter 5 Focus-Invisible Tethers: The Delicate Art of Surveillance-Based Love 127

Chapter 6 Judgment-Book and Word on the "Edge of Chaos" 153

Chapter 7 Awareness-The Post-Human Age: A Battle for Our Attention 183

Part III Dark Times ... Or Renaissance of Attention?

Chapter 8 McThinking and the Future of the Past 213

Chapter 9 The Gift of Attention-A Renaissance at Hand 237

Acknowledgments 267

Endnotes 269

Index 311