Multitasking is Like Functioning on a 0.16 Blood Alcohol Level

I am fresh back from not quite a full week away from the office.  It was as a nice break, although I am not sure you could call it a vacation.  I took my daughter, who is now a high school senior, to see some colleges in the greater Washington D.C. area.   It was also nice to visit with family there over the weekend.

While I blissfully shut myself off from social networking and social media for most of the time, my daughter compiled a veritable text messaging travelogue, documenting every step along the way (I force fed her some culture and history as we visited the National Mall, Smithsonian, etc.) by furiously typing on her cell phone.

It  has become part of our lore, how kids zoom past their parents in adopting technology.  I often watch in amazement as my two teen daughters sit in front of the TV, with MacBooks in their laps and cell phones in hands (sometimes a land line phone too, when they lower themselves to having an actual spoken conversation), attention darting between the devices.

Similarly, lately these days, people seem to take pride in their ability to shift between Tweeting, Facebooking, emailing, texting, etc. while simultaneously staying engaged with home and work projects.

Is all this multitasking a good thing?

There’s been tons of press lately about the dangers of texting while driving.  This NY Times article points out that some states are passing laws against texting while driving that come with penalties akin to those for drunk driving.  According to the article:

After a crash here that killed two scientists – and prompted a dogged investigation by a police officer and local victim’s advocate – Utah passed the nation’s toughest law to crack down on texting behind the wheel. Offenders now face up to 15 years in prison

It goes on to say:

Studies show that talking on a cellphone while driving is as risky as driving with a .08 blood alcohol level – generally the standard for drunken driving – and that the risk of driving while texting is at least twice that dangerous.

Yet another NY Times article described research from Stanford University on the subject of multitasking.

“Heavy multitaskers are lousy at multitasking… The more you do it, the worse you get,” said Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass… Compulsive media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention, worse at organizing information, and worse at quickly switching between tasks, the Stanford scientists wrote.

There’s a bright side to all this. Some have said that the growth in social media means a loss of serendipity when it comes to discovering information, because we are spoon fed streams, feeds, and alerts according to our specifications and keywords and limit ourselves to our social circles and search terms.

But the research found that multitaskers have a harder time ignoring spurious information.  According to the article:

A bright side to such distraction may mean that the media multitaskers will be first to notice anything new