Reviews for Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

The average rating for Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-20 00:00:00 Adam Podolski I had high hopes for this book because the premise is a verification of what I experience daily as a high school teacher. Students, and teachers for that matter, cannot seem to maintain proper attention to grasp key concepts. Maggie Jackson sets out to explain why attention is important to memory, which in turn provides all of us with a sense of self, and success in life. However, she delivers a choppy book filled with vignettes of our modern day multitasking but fails to show how this might lead us into a second dark ages, which is spelled out in the subtitle. Like her thesis, which might provide the book a bit of irony, Jackson herself seems distracted, weaving a text from present life to an historical analysis that is designed to show our progression throughout the centuries. Some chapters are good, for example the enlightening view of the rise and fall of the book and how our reading culture has turned from ink to pixels and from depth to breadth. However her multiple-page history of the fork could have been left on the editing floor. Overall, the reader finds segments of brilliantly-written prose, but the organization is disjointed, and Jackson falls back on her work as a columnist by incorporating too many direct quotes. Rather than making social commentary that is enlightened and lasting, Jackson produces nothing more than journalism-lite on the continuing erosion of our attention spans, which will not allow us to remember her attempt at cultural prediction.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-07 00:00:00 Don Aanonson Don't laugh, but I merely skimmed this book. I heard Maggie Jackson on a radio interview and was intrigued by her discussion of the apparent diminishing of our attention spans. After my perusal of the book, I determined that the anecdotal nature of her material made for better radio than reading. While trying to give this book a serious read, I wearied quickly of the platitudes regarding the displacement of our attention from such things as books to such things as twitter. Even more quickly, I got tired of the author's stylistic decision to introduce and interrupt every chapter with incessant anecdotes that I assume the author included in order to create some colorful context for the points she wanted to make. I found these digressions annoyingly distant from her focus. The notes and bibliography suggest this is a scholarly study, but it reads too much like a personal memoir. I want to know what you learned from your meeting with Professor Posner, not what the weather was like when you met him. This quick example illustrates this aggravating style: "Back home, Posner settled into a favorite chair, with a mug of coffee and his chocolate-and-black miniature schnauzer, Annie, by his side. Rain pattered on the cone-shaped roof of the simple, octagonal wooden yurt, as I peppered him with questions about what is perhaps the greatest detective story of our time: understanding how the brain--and especially attention--works." And more like this on every other page. So, yes, I skimmed.