In defense of unitasking

This is very bad news:

A new survey by Parks Associates shows that teenagers are less likely to communicate via e-mail than any other demographic.

According to the study, less than one-fifth of the 13-17-year-olds surveyed profess to using e-mail to communicate with friends, compared to 40 percent of adults aged 25-54.

The study shows that instant messaging is the dominant form of communication for teenagers, with one-third of teens relying on the messaging system, compared to only 11 percent of adults.

Why is this such bad news? Have you used instant messaging (IM)? Because of the real-time nature of the medium, the emphasis is placed on communicating the maximum information in the minimum time. Thus, IM-based communication is prone to misspelling, lack of proper punctuation, grammar errors, superficially reasoned logic, and cryptic code language that will not benefit the teen once he is in the real world (or the world as real as it gets).

Perhaps even worse is this factoid from the same piece:

"I think it is about multitasking," he said. "Younger kids are more likely to sit there and type on a computer while they're watching TV and talking on the phone. I think the younger generation is just adapting to this environment where they're doing 10 things at once."

Let me state this once and for all time: Men are positively *incapable* of effectively multitasking. Women, by and large due to their typically superior communication skills, are often able to process multiple streams of information simultaneously to a moderate degree of success. But the poor man - while he can handle one stream at 100% capacity, 2 streams drops efficiency to something like 80% (40% each stream) with a 20% loss in overhead, switching between streams. 3 streams is even worse, with a perhaps 33% loss. At 4 streams, the average man's brain simply shuts down and he is left with only enough focus to turn on SportsCenter.

Jared Sandberg has an excellent piece on the subject of multitasking at the WSJ's CareerJournal.com. He suggests:

Employers continue to seek out jugglers despite decades of research showing that humans aren't great multitaskers. (And in the case of distracted driving, we're downright dangerous.)

"Multitasking doesn't look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition," says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA's Ames Research Center. "It's almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality."

Researchers say analytical thinking can happen in parallel, as long as the tasks have been practiced. But the amount of practice is "too high for the practical world," says Dr. Johnston. And that wouldn't include, say, responding to emails, which requires "fantastically more cognition" than the much simpler tasks often included in multitasking research.

In the lab, researchers call it "multitasking" when subjects can recognize, for example, the colors of dots while also discerning high and low tones ... not exactly the skill set you need to win a vice presidency.

And in defense of good old unitasking:

Something else left out of the multitasking calculations -- beside the fact that we don't do it very well -- are "resumption costs." These are the seconds it takes your brain to say "Where was I?" when resuming an interrupted task. Depending on the tasks, those resumption costs can be high enough to make it faster to unitask, which researchers say produces better performance in the first place.

Don't you just feel better when you receive an e-mail, well thought-out, addressed solely to you - better, that is, than when you receive the usual cc'ed or bcc'ed forwarded schlock, misspellings no further embedded than the subject line? And in telephone conversations, don't you prefer a call from someone at home, doing nothing other than talking to you - prefer that to a call from someone simultaneously driving, eating, cursing at other drivers and listening to Justin Timberlake, interrupting your call to take another, then another? And when you actually speak with another human in person, don't you appreciate the sort of eye contact, closed mouth, and nodding assention that signals to you "I am important enough to deserve this fellow human's focus."?

What's old will be new again. In a world of multitaskers, the thoughtful unitasker can and shall stand apart.

Note: somewhat humorously, Sandberg's piece on multitasking sat on my desk for several weeks. I've seen, thought of it at least 10 times since I placed it there, each time trimming a little off my mental efficiency. Only when I saw the piece on teens' communication proclivities did I decide to comment on it.

Published at OpinionEditorials.com.