We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet
increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at the Yahoo
headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never
before, but we tend to 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 pings and beeps and more
multitasking. Welcome to the land of distraction. Despite our
wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a
culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new
world, something is amiss. And that something is - attention.
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. Taking us beyond "Blink and
Faster", 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 judgement, memory, morality, and happiness.
She describes some of the exciting new scientific research that
shows how these skills can be nurtured. "Distraction" is unique in
being simultaneously an original expose of the multifaceted nature
of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of
post-modern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating
sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society.
Pull over, hit the pause button, silence the ringer, and prepare to
encounter our land of distraction-this may be your first, and maybe
your last, chance to really fathom it.
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