Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

The Myth of Successful Multitasking

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Source: Centers for Disease Control
                       Image: Centers for Disease Control

As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates. 

As more of my students bring laptops and phones to class, their abilities to concentrate and retain even simple instructions delivered face to face seem to be under assault.  In many cases these are traditionally “strong” students: top-ranked in their high school classes, ambitious, and often intent on pursuing advanced degrees in medicine and other fields. Why are so many not retaining important conclusions or pieces of information?

There is no question a laptop is a great note-taking device. Many of us can type faster than we can write.  But one would have to believe in the tooth fairy to accept the premise that computers in the classroom are only used to deal with the material covered on a given day.  The sacred cow of full connectivity on campus makes it a virtual certainty that students may be placing their bodies in the classroom, but taking their minds elsewhere. Multi-tasking is the norm.  One Stanford faculty member notes that his research indicates a full quarter of his students are trying to use four different media at the same time while there are ostensibly focused on writing term papers.  We’ve all read the results of that kind of writing, and it’s usually not pretty.

The fundamental problem is that almost no one is good at multi-tasking.  We are simply not wired to split short-term memory between a variety of stimuli at once.  We may think otherwise. But there’s near unanimity in the literature on comprehension that critical thinking declines when we fragment our attention. To put it simply, multitasking makes us just a little bit stupid. As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates.  Sometimes the person addicted to a digital stew of stimuli is the last to know that they have become intellectually impaired.  It’s a common mistake to assume that being “busy” means being “fully engaged.”  We perform our busyness as a badge of honor.  But it’s closer to the truth to conclude that the more we construct lives where external stimuli are a constant, the less we are able to get past the self-induced noise that complicates the completion of an important task.

Try a simple experiment.  Try to read your e-mail or a series of text-messages while also listening to someone explain how to get to an address on the other side of town.  No GPSs allowed. An active and full-time listener will probably process the directions correctly, or ask questions until they have the mental map they need.  The split-time listener is more likely to end up lost, often compounding their addiction to distracted multi-tasking by calling from from a moving car to get new directions.

Of course there are many significant exceptions to acknowledge: those from all walks of life who still have the will to track the explication of a complex idea for an extended period; younger readers happily caught in the thrall of a writer or literary genre; newspaper consumers who will follow an investigative story across three pages of a broadsheet; or the curious who are sufficiently engaged to listen to another for a sustained amount of time. But these individuals increasingly seem to be cultural outliers. We now tend to notice a special passion for thirsty listening and reading.  They stand out from the norm.

So the caution stands: the fragmentation of daily life into competing multiple activities undermines competencies we should want to nurture and protect.  The things worth doing in life –if they are truly worthy of our time–are too important to be compromised by incessant (and non-linear) distraction.  My guess is that Franz Joseph Haydn would have never gotten around to writing those fabulous hundred and six symphonies if he owned a smartphone and an e-mail account.  How would he have had the time?

The Impoverished language of Communication Description

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In communication analysis, personal dispositions are often mistakenly converted into an ersatz psychology of the other.  

One of the ongoing challenges of talking about communication is that the language we use to describe effects and outcomes is hopelessly narrow.  Unlike other disciplines that have the obvious advantage of describing the material world, the language of rhetorical description seems relatively static and impoverished.  If we believe someone had a strong reaction to something said to them, we talk about the message’s “emotional” power, as if we were saying something important and decisive. But there’s rarely been a more useless word invoked as an ostensibly meaningful term of description.  Aristotle awkwardly used the idea 2500 years ago in one of the first rhetoric texts, and it still hangs around like an unwanted guest.

I’m as guilty as the next.  For over forty year, my own works of communication analysis have been filled with words like “expressive,” “media,” “interactions,” and “feelings,” as if these ideas were precise or even proximate units of meaningful exchange.  At best, such terms are mostly empty placeholders, begging for refinement and at least some operational detail.

We clearly need a richer lexicon that more thoroughly suggests the many nuanced responses that messages can elicit from receivers. Perhaps this is an essential function that is better carried by narrative film and literature. Poetry, the novel, and even music may often give us more precise pictures of the inner mental states we produce when we address others.  Even the standard “reaction shot” that a film director chooses when one character delivers bad news to another more clearly communicates authentic effects.  A face can register what our sometimes hackneyed language misses.

For example, take the challenge of naming intentions: a subject vital to understanding what individuals can possibly mean by their actions and words.  As I noted in The Rhetoric of Intention, the resources of ordinary English language seem inadequate to address the uncertainties and possibilities of reasons behind acts. There can be no question that we possess a rich vocabulary of feelings and affective states (“upset,”  “annoyed,” “excited,” and the like).  But we have no similar linguistic depth that would give us a lexicon of rhetorical intent.  We describe another’s likely reasons in an endless variety of available verb forms (i.e., “asserted,” “argued,” “pleaded”); but there are no exact counterparts for what should be the complementary “whys” of motivation. Instead attributions are made mostly by inserting imprecise qualifiers in front of clumsy and inexact interpretations of attitude. For instance:  “He may want her to make the first move,” “She doesn’t seem to be motivated by the money,” “Maybe he’s depressed,” and so on.

It’s not difficult to explain this mismatch between an important communication principle and its paltry vocabulary. This deficit is partly a consequence of the natural human compulsion to think deterministically. In our hardened presumption to find a language of first causes that can match the sciences, we mostly fall back on the inadequate language of psychological disposition.  The lexicons of psychology function as ill-fitting surrogates used to label all sorts of personal attitudes.  It’s as if every clinical word of description—common terms like “paranoid,” “depressed,” or “anxious” –is its own self-defining effect. The idea of jealousy, for example, is explained when we conclude that it springs from “envy,” or perhaps a “sublimation” of some sort arising from within. Personal dispositions are thus mistakenly converted into an ersatz psychology of the other.  In the process, we hardly notice that the rhetoric behind these labels remains mostly unnamed.

In practical terms, we could reform our usage by promising ourselves to depend less on empty but popular fallback terms of communication description, among them: “emotion,” “media” “feelings,” “rational,” and so on.  In their place there might be better terms that incrementally move us a little closer to naming the processes of communication with more precision.  My own preference is for a lexicon that would favor terms like “meaning” and “understanding:”  what is our best estimate of what we think receivers took away from a message?—“empathy” and “acknowledgement:” can we make a judgment about whether the needs of receivers were understood by the sender?—and was the message functionally “dialogical?”—meaning that we want to know if its source strived to make the receiver a true partner in the exchange. These attempts at greater precision are small steps, to be sure.  But they are a useful start.