We’re All Doomed. Wait, What Was I Talking About? Damn It, I Can’t Remember

Wired has an interview with Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here’s some of what she has to say:

Our society right now is filled with lovely distractions — we have so much portable escapism and mediated fantasy — but that’s just one issue. The other is interruption — multitasking, the fragmentation of thought and time. We’re living in highly interrupted ways. Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. Of course that’s what we have to do to live in this complicated world.

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In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn’t have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we’re doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

We’re all screwed.