MULTI-TAXING

by James Lincoln Warren

Although the term wasn’t coined until 1966, and then in the context of computers, multi-tasking (more recently spelled without the hyphen, I note, a sure indication that the word has become thoroughly domesticated) has been with us all along. I think the first reference I ever heard to the phenomenon was, “He’s so stupid he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

And chewing gum isn’t even dangerous, like smo—I mean, like driving.

Studies suggest that instead of doing one thing well, people who multi-task do several things poorly. In California, it has just become illegal to hold a mobile phone to your head and drive at the same time. (Unfortunately, the law does not prohibit anyone from texting (horrible word) and driving at the same time.) On the other hand, what exactly is multi-tasking, anyway? Many things that we describe as complex tasks are actually several simple tasks performed synchronously, or in a manner approaching synchronism, for example, driving in the first place.

When you drive, you have to watch for obstacles in three directions, regulate your speed, and steer. These are actually discrete tasks in themselves, and by combining them, we are multi-tasking. This at least is one of the arguments put forward in Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi S. Baron, Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C.

Of course, Prof. Baron isn’t really interested in driving—she’s interested in how language is used and how technology influences its use, and ultimately how such use radically influences human behavior. This is hardly a new thesis, of course—Time Magazine and A&E TV both declared Johannes Gutenberg the most influential human being of the last millennium.

She makes several fascinating points and backs them up with solid evidence, but I won’t go into most of them here. She has a very good chapter on blogs, for example. But I was writing about multi-tasking, and one of the strong points made in Always On is that the ubiquity of personal computers, PDAs, and mobile phones as language media has bred an inevitable tendency for people, especially young people, to multi-task while verbally communicating.

To me, this seems symptomatic of our instant-gratification culture, where sustained concentration and patient dedication are devalued along the whole behavioral spectrum, although I’m fully aware that expressing such a view may be the shibboleth of an old fogey. But still, it worries me. It suggests that instead of concentrating on communicating well, people are splitting their time between communicating poorly and making hash of whatever else they’re doing.

But my brain is not so agile that I can switch between tasks so easily. This is not due to age, either—I’ve always been this way, he said, cursing the straightjacket under his breath. Almost every other writer I know puts music on the stereo when they write. Not me. I like it quiet. If I put on a record, I lose my concentration and tend to listen to the music instead of to the stream of words I’m trying to draw forth from my brain. It would be like putting on music to read by, something I find utterly incomprehensible.

Of course, these days we live in the era of the Personal Soundtrack, when everybody sees themselves as the heroes of their respective Me Movies, with their favorite songs pressed into duty as the ultra-hip film scores. (“This song describes my life,” I read recently on line. The song was “The World Is Not Enough” by Garbage, the theme song to the like-named James Bond flick. The possible interpretations boggle the mind.)

But what really concerns me is that a lot of people report that they multi-task when they read. This may mean nothing more demanding than having the radio on, but it makes me wonder if this is one of the reasons why well-crafted, elegant prose is less prized than it was formerly—if people are no longer capable of giving their full attention to any one thing, then any singular experience demanding their full attention is rendered obsolete. The only way to obtain anybody’s full attention is an all-out assault on all their senses at once. You have to tax their perceptions to the limit just to get a response.

But getting back to whether driving really is multi-tasking, I personally think that the older expression, that of complex task, is more on point, because all of the discrete tasks involved in driving have a common purpose. I regard multi-tasking as taking on two or more tasks with independent goals. Playing the piano, another example of Prof. Baron’s, is not therefore multi-tasking. But doing your homework while watching videos on YouTube and playing World of Warcraft qualifies.

Like the multi-tasking moron in the Escalade babbling into his iPhone as he mindlessly drifts across the freeway lanes and cuts off every vehicle in his path. That moron is attempting to conduct two mutually exclusive tasks, those of driving and talking. By doing so, he’s putting everybody on the road in imminent danger. And incidentally breaking the law.

But he’s also devaluing the power of language. Remember, the studies say that multi-taskers do all of their tasks poorly. This is not deliberate, of course. It’s an act of negligence. But negligence is the deadliest sin by far. Not paying attention when you drive, for example, is likely to get you killed.

A lot of writers have been worried that the advent of Print on Demand technology, which democratizes the manufacture of books in a way Gutenberg could never have dreamed of, might lead to the degradation of narrative standards as the untutored rush to fill the market place with trash. This aspect of technological influence on language is the least of our worries. What is much, much worse is that readers are demanding less. They’re too busy multi-tasking to pay attention to whether or not what they read has any merit.