From here and from there - 8
About a week ago we went to see Aaron Sorkin’s new play “The Farnsworth Invention”. It was amazing, and sad, to see how almost everybody, during the brake and obviously on the way out, couldn’t turn away from their cellphones. I’m sure that some people were waiting for an important message, and some were really important and had to be in contact with whatever organization they belong to. But everyone?
It reminded me how few years ago when they start to advertise WiFi they had a TV ad about someone that is working from the beach, pretending to be in the office. I remember watching it and thinking: “hell no! when I’m on the beach I don’t want to work”. But all these gadgets and devices that supposed to free us made us slave for connectivity and for the new god: Multi Tasking.
When I’m not busy blogging I am working as a Program Manager and I learned to despise the term Multi-Tasking. It was probably developed by some MBA student and sound nice, but in reality it is one of the dumbest ideas. Whenever someone suggest that I will have rethink the way I’m assigning developers to projects more efficiently because the should multi-task I know that I’m dealing with an idiot. But now instead of getting upset, I’m just going to distribute this article to as many people as I can, maybe we can start killing this phenomena:
it isn’t working, it never has worked, and though we’re still pushing and driving to make it work and puzzled as to why we haven’t stopped yet, which makes us think we may go on forever, the stoppage or slowdown is coming nonetheless, and when it does, we’ll be startled for a moment, and then we’ll acknowledge that, way down deep inside ourselves (a place that we almost forgot even existed), we always knew it couldn’t work.
The scientists know this too, and they think they know why. Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
If we are dealing with god, an interesting debate about god and morality. It is about 90 minutes long, but it is worth it, if only because of Christopher Hitchens.
And last link for this post, another unforeseen effect of promoting ethanol.
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Rogel @ October 27, 2007