Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Challenging, Thoughtful Analysis of a Problem we are facing today...

Recently, my husband suggested a book for me to read. It was Distracted by Maggie Jackson. I began reading it. This book is very different than the books I usually review. It is a sociological and at times psychological analysis of our attention span and some of our cultural habits as a people. The premise of this book is (in my words) that the rise of technology in our world is contributiong to a decline in our ability to focus and pay attention. Our relationships and learning are suffering because of it. So, is all of the technology in our world really progress? Is this the progress we want?
From the beginning, this book really made me think. My husband and I have chosen not to text and instead we have prepaid cell phones. We are very low tech in many ways. Even so, I've realized how often I check my email and facebook and how much time has gotten sucked away by me watching shows online. I've even started to have eerie and surreal thoughts about what is real and what is virtual. My attention span is being split and is declining. I am distracted from what I really need to do and what is most worth investing my time in.
Reading this book reinforced some of the things I have seen in myself on a micro level and have been concerned for our society about on a macro level. Texting is really only the tip of the iceberg and this book opened my eyes to a lot of things that are going on that I didn't even realize. For example, Maggie Jackson quoted a study that found that 20% of the players on EverQuest "say that they consider themselves denizens of the game who are just visiting Earth." Distracted, p. 56. Wow! Truly, the virtual world has taken hold. It is seeming more real to many people than the life they are really living in person.

I highly recommend this book. The writing is good (as you can see from the quotes), though at times very intellectual. But, it is worth pressing on and taking your time to get through. The parts I learned the most from were in the first half. There is a large section in the second half that is about a study involving Buddhism and attention. Buddhism is written about as a behavior/lifestyle rather than as a religion.

One last quote I think is worth pondering:
"If we want to shape our own future, we must consider how we want to live and how we want to define progress, and as we do so, prepare to welcome to our ranks the thinking person's most prickly yet necessary companion-doubt." from Distracted by Maggie Jackson, pg. 215

Please note that I was given a complimentary copy of this book for review by Prometheus Books.

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Good concept. Awful writing.

I chose this book for a class thinking it just might give me a couple of adequate reasons to tell people to stop rudely interrupting their conversations to answer a text. A dumb and personal goal, I know, but this book did end up giving me several points I could share with chronic texters, that is, once I could will myself to get past the crazy theories and the god awful writing style that Maggie Jackson unfortunately has.

This book isn't just all about the problems of texting, but about technology as a whole negatively affecting our minds, relationships with people, attention spans, even the way we eat. Basically, the book's whole goal is to try to persuade its readers that technology will be the humans' undoing, that the human (Well, more specifically American) race will become so dependent on technology that a dark age of stupidity and ignorance will come about. Distracted had amazing potential, and there was truth to it in some aspects, but there were just too many insane theories and biased, unbelievable statistics to swallow. For example, all Americans are becoming nomadic due to technology, or all Americans are wanting to be in multiple places at once. As for the statistics, they are so ridiculous that I wrote them off as just that, ridiculous. For example, the average teenager multitasks on five to eight different things at once. Maybe I'm just not average, but my normal is two to three things at once.

As for Jackson's writing style, I literally have never seen worse writing. I could get past the droning statistics, the unnecessary physical descriptions of the people Jackson interviewed, or even the random quotes that sometimes didn't exactly apply to what she was writing about, but her way of proving her points was the most ironic and laughably bad thing I have ever seen. Let me explain: First Jackson would present the point, then she would introduce a story to prove her point, lacking any sort of transition whatsoever. This story would be so detailed, so chock full of unnecessary complexities and things that didn't matter whatsoever that the point she was trying to prove would inevitably become lost to the reader... until BLAM, her point randomly shows up again and lacking any sort of transition, of course. It's confusing, and for a book writing about an ADD society and distraction, extremely ironic. It's like she gets distracted while writing Distracted.

In the end, I came to this book with an open mind, but had to plod through it to get it over with. Many other people in my AP class, smart people who generally love to read, ended up despising this book. Distracted could have been great, but thanks to Jackson distracting her own readers with her god awful writing style and worthless details along with many overly dramatic theories, this book was an extremely painful read.

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