Friday, January 16, 2004

The Flip Side Of Multi(media)tasking

It's logical and intuitively obvious that the more tasks you try to take on at once, the less total brain you'll be able to spare for a given task; it's this truth which underscores the importance of organization, compartmentalization, interconnection, and the ability to locate and search in the modern noetic, where once a print-dominant culture mandated linearity and logic (and, before that, orality demanded memory and the ability to store memory iconographically).

Symptomatically, we've know this all along: remember being on the phone, strange faint noises filling the background, finally realizing that the reason your conversation isn't going anywhere is that the idiot on the other line is watching TV while supposedly talking to you? Keyboard clicking is just as easy to overhear, but this time, according to "the brainy people who study these things" -- don't you just love modern journalism? -- the resulting speech pattern which belies inattention apparently deserves a formal popsociology phrase: "surfer's voice." This is news?

posted by boyhowdy | 2:26 PM |

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