I already know I’m really bad at multitasking. I'm pretty sure I got to the end of the test but then again, I think they were supposed to give me results.
I have a husband, two kids, and three dogs. Two birds. Couple turtles. A house that refuses to clean itself, that kind of thing. I figure someone with a really loose definition of multitasking might say that I practice it, but they’d be wrong. My personal method would be defined less as multitasking and more as starting a hundred and six different tasks, one right after the other, and then migrating from task to task. For days on end. It’s an aimless sort of process and doesn't save me any time, but it does create the illusion that I’m getting more done than I actually am.
If that New York Times article on faking it is any indication, that 2% statistic is not a misprint. For the most part, we humans like to save time and cognitive resources by relying on our automatic responses. Hey, it serves us well most of the time.
I’m no supertasker by any stretch of the imagination, but I probably do fit Hemp’s description of the information addict. Addict is such a strong word, though. I really prefer the more informal "information junkie".
In my experience, most EMAC people are information junkies. We’re the Internet curators and fact checkers and social media managers. Information collectors and dispersers.
In a class I took a couple years ago, some fellow students conducted a sort of mini-study on the sharing of misinformation. They surveyed students in the ATEC, JSOM, and SU buildings and found that most respondents had at some point shared information that was later proven incorrect. Their responses went something like, "We never imagined it wouldn't be true, and anyway, who cares?"
EMAC students were the exception. To us, that sort of gaffe is practically criminal. Our battle cry is, "Hang on, I'll look that up!" We know the information is there for the taking. We can't even help ourselves.
If we’re experiencing information overload, the situation must be truly dire.
We’re all full-fledged participants in what social media scholar danah boyd calls the ‘always-on lifestyle’. When asked how many hours a day she spends online, boyd can’t come up with a number because she reaches a stumbling block immediately: What exactly counts as online?
Count up the hours you sleep, she suggests, and add them in with the time you spend in the shower. Hmm, do you scroll through Facebook when you can’t sleep? Tweet from the dinner table? Would those be ‘on’ times, then?
Our environment is complex. It’s twisty and elaborate and hurls us piles of data nonstop. Adding more on top of that was bound to throw a kink or two our way.
Being connected to the network constantly has changed the way we do a lot of things. According to the research we’ve seen, print news isn't stumbling along on its last legs yet, but the Internet has still markedly changed the way we consume news.
Pentina and Tarafdar's study on social media’s role in news consumption found evidence that information overload doesn’t necessarily dictate that people actually consume it.
As the Times article has already pointed out, we decipher bits and pieces and pick up summaries and memes and others’ remarks. These bits and pieces can provide us with enough about a given subject that once we've internalized them, we start to wonder where the wisdom is in gathering knowledge for ourselves.
We're basically a society of skimmers. At the very least, the gist of anything is all we really need to get by.
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