Distracted

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson, 266 pages

In the twenty-first century, Americans (and others) have nearly instant access to an amount of information and entertainment undreamed of even a few decades ago.  The average person is bombarded with messages on all sides, surrounded by insistent claimants for attention.  The result is that real attention, care, is vanishingly rare.  Deep understanding, the product of slow study and quiet contemplation, has been replaced by shallow acquisition of facts, which is, in turn, rapidly being replaced by the mere knowledge of where to find data.  Worse, the constant clamor of the external world results in the withering of any kind of interior life.

This is an interesting subject, and Jackson presents a great deal of information on recent brain research and technological developments.  Ultimately, however, Distracted suffers from the very same disease it diagnoses in society.  Coming from a journalism background, the author has packed her book with so many human interest stories and mini-profiles designed to hold our interest that the result is diffuse and confused.  In the end Jackson is reduced to the absurd promise that science will invent a pill that will restore our ability to care.

Readers would be better off exchanging Jackson's cutting edge science for Neil Postman's decades old works Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death.