Multitasking

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

The above is an interesting article very critical of multitasking and trying to do too many things at once in the modern era.

My personal opinion on it is that multi-tasking can simply help use up boring congitive downtime in our lives, filling car trips with music, walking and talking on a cell phone, listening to the news over a meal, etc. A lot of activities by themselves simply don't engage or fully stimulate my brain in the ways it's been trained to crave. The dangers of it can include seeking out a constant shallow attention fix of something new and interesting to focus on without delving too deep into anything in particular, seeking constant interruptions for the sake of distraction, and dividing up one's time between critical tasks that really should just be focused on to their fullest extent one at a time. I'll sometimes poke fun at people for not devoting their full attention to a good movie the way you would in a theater, or envy the leagues of college students taking performing-enhancing perscription drugs to improve their own ability to focus.

That said, there are values to the methodology, in the process of writing a blog entry I may constantly pause to look something up, reference other sources, in the hope that that will save me time in the long run. And there are dangers to obsessively focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, you can miss alternate solutions and ideas or simply get stuck without having a fresh concept to spark your imagination. I sometimes go on spurts of very intense work where I focus on one thing while ignoring all other concerns, physical or mental, which is the basis of my best productive flow, and it's probably a very engineerish trait to have the ability to focus on problems that can take hours to solve. But ultimately some tasks and situations need that kind of obsessive focus, and for others there may be benefits to dividing up your time and attention. As with most things, there's no categorical benefit to one over the other, sometimes you need to shut everything else out and sometimes you need a break.

(in thinking about this, I'd want to draw a distinction between context switching between activities all related to a central task, like possibly looking up references for something while writing or tracking down a problem by different methods, as opposed to absorbing multiple types of information at once or constantly toggling back and forth between two tasks. The former is a neccessary part of tackling some complex problems, whereas the latter is more of a juggling act to presumably save time)

Everything Bad is Good for You

Every Christmas I try to pick up a weighty non-fiction book I've heard good things about and delve into it, for personal self-betterment. Freakanomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Collapse-How Societies Succeed or Fail, Blink-Split Second Decision Making, and prior to that a lot of the works of Thomas Sowell, an economist. Along with my typical pattern of picking up a huge slew of nerd/pop culture stuff when Comic-Con arrives, it helps round out my year and gives me some interesting ideas to consume for mental fodder.

This year's self-selected title is Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. With a premise like that, I'm on board and ready to accept everything he says before he spits out a single word. His argument is that television, movies, and video games are not "mindless mush" in the sense often described by cultural critics that encourage the brain to disengage and vegetate. The brain craves complexity and challenge, and the level of sophistication in the culture consumed in American society has continually risen over the last 30 years.

A large part of the point to his book is that you have to evaluate the pros and cons of a medium on its own terms. Books and the written word are excellent for discussing abstract concepts, presenting an argument, and dealing with organized information in fashion that the reader is expected to continually check back and reference things. Television is much better suited for relaying events, images and situations, even if its ability to fully develop an argument is limited to what it could portray in a conversation. And games are something different altogether, analyzing a game according to the richness of its plot or aesthetics of its world is often missing the point, since the fundamental structure of a game is a system of rules and interactions which the player is intended to probe, explore, and develop strategies around.

Television and movies have grown more subtle in his estimation by spelling things out less explicitly for the viewer and more naturally, and incorporating an ever-increasing number of relationships and subplots the viewer is expected to keep track of. In addition, the rise of syndication, and dvd box sets of tv shows has changed the market to where it pays to develop a show that stands up well to repeated viewings, and shows can make an entire season based around continuity and developing a single storyline.

The author doesn't get into this as much, but the rise of the internet in particular seems to have encouraging implications for media. A series can flop on TV to be picked up by a hardcore fanbase later and possibly bring it back or develop a buzz for it without going through normal channels. Songs can become chart-toppers without receiving any radio play, and it's easier than ever to filter out the stuff that would be of particular interest to you.

He cites the fact that IQ scores measuring abstract problem solving ability have risen over the last thirty years, even as tests measuring our math/verbal skills have stayed stagnant. It's an interesting take on different mediums and how they've evolved, and it's always encouraging to see some trends that appear to be moving in the right direction.