List Price: $25.95You Pay Only: $17.13 You Save: $8.82 (34%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.0973
EAN: 9781591026235
ISBN: 1591026237
Label: Prometheus Books
Manufacturer: Prometheus Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 327
Publication Date: June 04, 2008
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Sales Rank: 14843
Studio: Prometheus Books
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Book Description:
Foreword by Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben Reader
We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at online headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never before, but we communicate even with our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur with electronic interruptions and a lack of focus.
Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing--attention. Attention is the key to recapturing our ability to reconnect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world that isn't going to slow down or get simpler. Attention can keep us grounded and focused--not diffused and fragmented.
Distracted offers the cutting-edge solutions we need to cure--not just live with--an epidemic of inattention. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse--in bed? At a time when we can contact millions of people worldwide, why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it?
Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses, skimming, McThinking, and mistrust.
Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity, and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. She investigates the science of attention--describing some of the exciting new scientific research that shows how attention skills can be nurtured.
Taking us beyond Blink, Faster, and CrazyBusy, Distraction is unique. It's simultaneously an original exposé of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of postmodern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Chronicle of Our ADD Society ...
I began this book with high hopes but it just never grabbed me; maybe it was me and I just got distracted. The thesis of the book I think could have been developed convincingly in about ten pages. I doubt there are many who might dispute that we live in an ADD society.
The solutions? Don't necessarily look to Maggie Jackson or her book for answers, though she states up front that it is not her aim to offer a solution.
A fairly effective - if over-written - description of our ADD society.
Rating:  - Not what I expected
Read an article in the Boston Sunday Globe written by this author. She cited her book and I purchased and read it thinking it would help a teacher in dealing with kids who are easily distracted. Dry. Tough to read. Not worth the purchase. Sorry!
Rating: - An Unfocused Look at Extremes Followed by Encouragement to Meditate
Do you understand a society better by looking at the edges or at the middle? That's the fundamental question that any social scientist and author must answer. Ms. Jackson shows her journalist roots by making alarmist arguments about a "dark age" based on looking at the most extreme forms of inattention in society and extrapolating those extremes into a future where that's the norm. In doing so, she throws anecdote after anecdote pretty harmlessly against the wall.
Do you agree that quiet is better than too much noise? Do you think that being able to concentrate is something worth cultivating? Do you think that most of what's on the Internet is worthless junk? Are you interested in people staying focused so they can make better judgments? Do you find meditation helpful? If you said "yes" to those questions, you'll agree with this book . . . but you won't learn much that you didn't know already unless you read nothing about the way brains work. Even if you want to learn about brain physiology, this isn't a very good book.
I found the overstatement to be irritating, as well. Otherwise, I would have rated the book at three stars.
You can lead a person to education, but you can't make him or her think. that's always been a problem. The new context just adds color to the old dilemma.
Rating:  - An intriguing story of... Oh, look! A chicken!
Distracted is the story of the function of attention. In nine chapters organized into three parts, Maggie Jackson takes us on a tour of the past, present, and possible future of our ability to pay attention. She begins with Part I ("Lengthening Shadows"), considering the landscape of our consciousness today. Jackson winds the calendar back to 1880 to examine a society that has become interrupt-driven. Her look at technology brings us through life in a virtual world, high-bandwidth information delivery, and how we have optimized our lives to work "on the go," rather than where we are.
In Part II ("Deepening Twilight") Jackson looks at surveillance, the use of technology to observe, and its impact on the observed. Moving on to how we process information, she writes about the history of speech and the history of writing. She then focuses on reading--not an act of nature, but one that we must undertake deliberately if we're to do at all. We're then taken into the world of "smart machines," computers and robots that display empathy and that give us the kind of personal attention that we seem incapable of getting from other humans.
Undoubtedly, distracted readers will fail to realize that the journey has taken them through two iterations of three critical components of thinking: focus, judgment, and awareness.
Part III ("Dark Times...Or a Renaissance of Attention?") introduces a lovely term, McThinking, and considers what happens to our ability to succeed, to plan, ... Read More
Rating: - Disappointed
I was a little disappointed in this book. It's for the most part a long essay, and the author seems to meander quite a bit. I wouldn't have minded this if there had been a few deeply insightful moments, but most of the creative energy here is spent pointing out the obvious and then supporting the obvious with lots and lots and lots of quotes and citations. This is a sometimes well-written and interesting book, but it reads a bit like having a dinner conversation with one of your really intelligent friends. Nice for an evening of distraction, but I was hoping for considerably more in a book that came with such high praise.
Browse for similar items by category:
|
