Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention by Maggie Jackson

Description: Distracted by Maggie Jackson In the first edition of this groundbreaking book, Maggie Jackson sounded a prescient warning of a looming crisis- the fragmentation of attention that is eroding our abilities to problem-solve, innovate, and care for one another. Now in this updated edition with an incisive new preface, she offers both a renewed wake-up call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing problems of our time. How can we harness the technological marvels of our age more wisely and turn data into knowledge and distraction into attention? How can we reset human bonds in a time of deep disconnect? We must, she argues, curb technological excess by cultivating the full gamut of our attentional capabilities. We must look first to the human behind the device. Jackson is our expert guide in exploring the historic roots of distraction, the perils we face in melding human and machine, and the cutting-edge science that reveals the attentional skills most needed in an age of overload. Timely and unforgettable, Distracted offers a harrowing yet hopeful account of the fate of our highest human capacity. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist whose commentary and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, and on National Public Radio, among many other publications. Her essays feature in numerous anthologies, including The State of the American Mind- Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide (Penguin, 2010). A former Boston Globe contributing columnist, Jackson lives in New York City and Rhode Island with her family. Review "Distracted concentrates the mind on a real problem of modern life" - Wall Street Journal"Influential" - New Yorker WINNER of the 2020 Dorothy Lee Book Award for Outstanding Book on Technology and Culture Promotional This visionary book details the steep costs of our deepening crisis of distraction and reveals remarkable scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus and sustained attention. Long Description In the first edition of this groundbreaking book, Maggie Jackson sounded a prescient warning of a looming crisis- the fragmentation of attention that is eroding our abilities to problem-solve, innovate, and care for one another. Now in this updated edition with an incisive new preface, she offers both a renewed wake-up call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing problems of our time. How can we harness the technological marvels of our age more wisely and turn data into knowledge and distraction into attention? How can we reset human bonds in a time of deep disconnect? We must, she argues, curb technological excess by cultivating the full gamut of our attentional capabilities. We must look first to the human behind the device. Jackson is our expert guide in exploring the historic roots of distraction, the perils we face in melding human and machine, and the cutting-edge science that reveals the attentional skills most needed in an age of overload. Timely and unforgettable, Distracted offers a harrowing yet hopeful account of the fate of our highest human capacity. Review Text ""Prescient when it originally appeared, Distracted is now MORE ESSENTIAL THAN EVER. This new edition deserves your full attention." - Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage "Maggie Jackson has an ear fine-tuned to what is important in the culture--to the trends that matter! She writes beautifully, in a way that commands attention, but when there is poetry in her subject she makes sure that it gets its due. Im a fan!" --Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor, and author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together Review Quote "Prescient when it originally appeared, Distracted is now MORE ESSENTIAL THAN EVER. This new edition deserves your full attention." - Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage "Maggie Jackson has an ear fine-tuned to what is important in the culture--to the trends that matter! She writes beautifully, in a way that commands attention, but when there is poetry in her subject she makes sure that it gets its due. Im a fan!" --Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor, and author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together Promotional "Headline" This visionary book details the steep costs of our deepening crisis of distraction and reveals remarkable scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus and sustained attention. Excerpt from Book Preface to the New Edition The pace was brisk and the dialogue frenetic. The one-liners flew thick and fast. In a small New York theater, I was watching Distracted , a play centered on a mothers struggle to cope with her nine-year-old sons attention deficit disorder. The year was 2009. Onstage, a mammoth wall of television monitors spewing sports, news, and sitcoms competed with the actors for the spectators attention. And just in front of me, two women in the audience compounded the evenings cacophony with a running sideshow of phone-checking and chatter. Nearly a decade ago, the world was growing ever more noisy and overloaded. We didnt need to fire up a laptop, a BlackBerry, or its new competitor the iPhone to feel the insistent clamor of modern life. Were these glorious new riches for the heart and mind or an excess to be feared? we wondered. "This is an ADD society," Distracted s playwright Lisa Loomer told an interviewer, "and I dont know whether this is a dysfunction or a difference." It was the heyday, after all, of our yearning to live in the fast lane. Multitasking was a job description, a sure mark of success. Juggling was a mothers main ambition, the booster rocket to having it all. The problem of distraction, we fervently hoped, was someone elses burden, a malady for those who simply couldnt keep up. We didnt need to pay much attention to the costs of this way of living, or so we thought. The future was ours to splice. Distracted , the play, was billed as a comedy. Now the curtain rarely falls on quick-cut, split-focus living. A crisis of inattention has crept onto center stage of an increasingly technological world. Skimming as a mainstay, days mired in trivia, interactions faceless and fractured, perpetually shattered focus: all these are no longer the daily diet of an elite and busy few. Toddlers stare with glazed eyes at the screen of the moment, oblivious to the real world blooming all around them. Early on, they learn that neat, easy answers come from gleaming little boxes that mesmerize their parents. In an era prizing diffusion, the young in effect are groomed to be half there, in class or at the dinner table, in the office or crossing the street. By one estimate, people check their devices an average of eighty-five times or more a day, anxiously searching for yet another dopamine-laced reward. So habituated are we to the siren song of being elsewhere that the mere presence of our own phone, silent and untouched, dramatically undermines our powers of focus. A Pandoras box has sprung open. The struggle now seems real, and we are increasingly torn and uneasy. Americans are almost evenly divided over whether technology has had a positive overall effect on their lives. A majority of middle and high school teachers now believe that technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically. Is all this just the price to be paid for progress? Or are we, at growing cost to our very humanity, chasing a mirage? A decade ago, the signs were all there and this book sounded a prescient warning. We have been perilously slow, however, in waking up to a crisis of our own making and even to the depths of our distraction. Avid multitaskers, for instance, are least able to juggle well and yet are most confident in their ability to do so. Or consider that beckoning phone. In laboratory studies, most of those whose focus is impaired in the presence of their devices later insist that they have not been affected at all. They are oblivious to what scientist Adrian Ward calls the "brain drain" of distrac-tion. Are we at last willing to question our hubris and take the full measure of our plight? Are we ready to face up to one of the most pressing problems of our age? Today I see our growing unease as a starting point, a potent spur toward an urgently needed reckoning. Attention is the stepping-stone to wisdom, intimacy, and creativity. It is the capacity that decides the fate of the present moment and determines the shape of the future. Without it, we are adrift. It is now time to focus on what matters and give attention its due. As I write these words, a public outcry has erupted, condemning the behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple for failing to protect our data and our politics from hackers. But perhaps most unsettling has been the discovery that the inventors whom we so revere have themselves been hacking our minds. "Their most precious asset, is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it," writes critic Franklin Foer. To public applause, Google turncoat Tristan Harris reveals the brain-hacking tricks that the "worlds smartest minds" have devised to influence peoples every online move: the slot machine-like bursts of rewards that keep us hooked to our devices, the urgency implied by notifications that constantly interrupt us, and the video autoplay that undercuts a viewers agency. Day by day, increasingly sophisticated technologies exploit the ceaseless yearning for validation and novelty that underlies human survival. "Its the devils work," a sales executive tells me, holding up his phone as we stand outside a funeral home waiting in line to enter a wake. He seems distressed and yet proud that he is constantly needed, or so his device tells him. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him struggle to finish a text just before we reach the casket. Is escape then our best recourse for salvaging what one app developer calls our "cognitive liberty"? Not long ago, a detox referred to a renunciation of drugs or alcohol by abusers; now it is more often synonymous with a comic-tragic hiatus from technology thats open to all. A grand-mother relates that her friends force their grandchildren to park their screens in baskets by the front door when they visit. Professors assign brief withdrawals to tremulous students. Joining a burgeoning market-place for digital detox retreats, hotels from Paris to Pittsburgh offer to lock up guests devices before ushering them to tech-free spas or suites. The off button, we believe, can keep distraction at bay, allowing for a magical restoration of all that we have lost in a time of stolen attention. It offers a Romantic hope, a page from Rousseau: if we can withdraw from our devices, we can be cleansed of the toxins of digital living and recover the gifts of an attentive mind. We once again can frolic, as Keats wrote in Ode to Psyche , in "the wreathd trellis of a working brain." Yet so often we falter, eschewing or outright failing the Facebook Fast or Media Sabbath. Sixty-five percent of American adults deem periodic unplugging important for their mental health, yet less than a third of those who say this do so. In one experiment, most of one thousand college students from ten countries couldnt last twenty-four hours without media, even for a class assignment. Some quit after just half an hour. When I interviewed University of Maryland students taking part in a pilot study for the project, many admitted to the merits of the detox. They had paid more attention to their studies and felt more productive. Yet the silence and aloneness of an unmediated day unnerved them. "I was out of my element almost," said a junior, a journalism major from Boston. "I had no connection to anything." In the end, the grand forces of distraction seem too relent-less, too inevitable, and surely too inviting to be tamed with a mere respite. And so we increasingly turn back to the machine for answers, hoping that the mechanized marvels that beset us can protect us as well. "Technology Promised to Make Living Easier, but Complicated It Instead. The Answer: More Tech," trumpets the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article about the apps and gadgets that can help us curb our tech dependence. Extending the detox to small slivers of the day, the spartan LightPhone or popular Freedom or Concentrate apps block out parts or all of the enticing Web. Or we can take a step further and ask our machinery to curate our moment-to-moment focus: the ebb and flow of our inbox, the news and jokes we see, the times we wake or sleep. By allowing a meditation app to choose which practice that I next under-take, I am for a moment giving it free rein over my mind. Soon screens will have "attentive user interfaces" that watch us in order to learn when and how best to interrupt us with that urgent call from the boss or extra-neous text from mom. Their efforts to score "maximum informational throughput," we should note, will be drawn from studying human habits that are in turn increasingly shaped by machines. Even as we begin to rue what technology does to us, we are asking all the more what it can do for us. Our species always has been a tool user extraordinaire, a crafty seeker of ways to augment its capabilities. Now as we grow seamlessly connected to enchanting artificial intelligences, we begin to treat them less as tools and more as coaches, sages, nursemaids, and confidantes. More than a third of smartphone users rate their devices as more than or equally important to their close friends. Tell me, Alexa, should I date this guy? How do I look today? What should I do next? Users pose these kinds of questions to the AI-driven assistants, now used by twenty-five million Americans. To outsource control of our attention to the devices that we yearn to trust and revere is but a simple step. With the flick of a switch, we can off-load care of our unruly minds and cure our human failings. Or can we? When my daughter was eleven years old, administrators at her school decided to lend each student a laptop for use in class and at home. Soon alarmed by the tide of easy diversions that had been unleashed, the school installed a blocki Details ISBN1633884627 Author Maggie Jackson Publisher Prometheus Books Year 2018 ISBN-10 1633884627 ISBN-13 9781633884625 Format Paperback Imprint Prometheus Books Subtitle Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention Place of Publication Amherst Country of Publication United States Media Book DEWEY 973.92 Illustrations 0 Illustrations, unspecified Short Title Distracted Language English Publication Date 2018-09-20 UK Release Date 2018-09-20 NZ Release Date 2018-09-20 US Release Date 2018-09-20 Pages 336 Audience General AU Release Date 2018-09-14 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:119085101;

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