Most of us who make a living with the written word also monitor the evolution of the English language. Around the HMT office, we’re sure that by the time we editors are entrenched in nursing homes, those in charge—administrators, nursing directors and case managers—will stem from the crop of workers who are today’s teens and for whom a substantive conversation consists of IMs like this (as reported by Time magazine, March 27):
“wat up dude”
“nmu” (Not much. You?)
Most of us who make a living with the written word also monitor the evolution of the English language. Around the HMT office, we’re sure that by the time we editors are entrenched in nursing homes, those in charge—administrators, nursing directors and case managers—will stem from the crop of workers who are today’s teens and for whom a substantive conversation consists of IMs like this (as reported by Time magazine, March 27):
“wat up dude”
“nmu” (Not much. You?)
Apparently, this level of communication, when engaged in simultaneously with other activities such as watching TV and doing homework, meets the requirements of today’s definition of multitasking. Time dedicated eight pages to teenage wiredness and multitasking, along with how the phenomenon impacts our social structure, even compelling college professors to alter their presentation of course materials.
Multitasking is publicly heralded and valued as if it were a real process, when, in fact, only the most protozoan activities can be multitasked. Everything beyond extremely automated activities, that requires even a modicum of comprehension, also requires sequential tasking, not multitasking—even if the sequences are just segments of 10 or 20 seconds, one after another, according to Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Most of us are forced to multitask in today’s work environments. The simple crafting of 560 words for this editorial competes with phones ringing, e-mail delivery and coworkers knocking on my door—all within a new social milieu that implies that everyone’s query is important enough to be addressed as expediently as possible. What happened to It’s All About Me? When did it become It’s All About Them?
Those of us who shutter the door, ignore the phone and don’t continuously stream new e-mail to our desktops when writing are so yesterday that some of us may be unemployable in 10 years. This is despite the fact that, “When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer—often double the time or more—to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially,” according to David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Aren’t these exactly the outcomes technology is supposed to prevent?
Every day, we editors witness the thrill and promise of technology, manifested by organizations like digital heart hospitals and paperless physician practices, where daily business is nothing if not digital. We marvel. Who doesn’t want to be treated by those practitioners and within those organizations? But the fear and dread is that technology also is producing a next generation—my future caregivers—that cannot speak, much less diagram, a declarative sentence, calculate 12 percent of 68,320 with only a pencil or write the articles you see in every issue of HMT.
At one level, who cares? I won’t be reading HMT in my eighties. At another level, 25 years from now, one of today’s multitasking teens may be pushing my wheelchair to PT. If David Meyer is right, I could miss PT altogether and arrive two hours later at Wednesday night bingo instead.
Frankly, I would prefer that technology enhances my favorite process: Do one thing at a time, do it extremely well, and then push on to the next item.
