My way

My sons are pretty savvy with electronics.  They grew up with all kinds of gaming devices and started using a PC before they were able to read.  As much as I would like to be the father of particularly gifted kids, they are just average citizens of the new world. 

My third son used to use the "picture in picture" feature on the TV to play Xbox while watching his favorite show.  This irked me a little.  He was training himself to divide his attention in an unusual way.  He would hold a conversation with me while playing the game and semi watching the show.  When the game got hard you could notice how his attention would drift away from the conversation, he would not finish the sentence or would forget what it was just said.  I discouraged this picture in picture deal.  This type of multi tasking felt like the wrong kind of training for a young mind.

My older kids get texts and instant messages, updates from Facebook and Tweeter from their phones while we have dinner and we are trying to have a conversation.  I also have to come clean about my own bad habits.  I write my blog while  listening to Spotify, keeping an eye on Facebook, occasionally talking to my wife and kids and peeking at the TV here and there.  This after I spend over ten hours at work reading emails, getting calls, dealing with impromptu visits and handling questions from dozens of people while trying to finish tasks that require complete concentration and are tightly time bound.  Yes, living the dream, but I digress...

It seems we are engaging on a worldwide experiment on the psychological effects of divided attention and information overload.  The social scientist Alvin Toffler nicknamed this situation "infobesity".  Information overload interferes with our ability to reach conclusions and makes errors of judgement more frequent.  It is like  taking a math test at a Metallica concert.

When immersed in information overload, we quickly develop strategies to cope.  Naturally we ignore  a great deal of what we are exposed to.  Filtering is the first step at becoming an attention specialist.  Some folks just follow music and sports, celebrities and politics, local news and whatever else. Once we have picked our favorite attention channel, we relate mainly to people with like interests on social media and find the key cable channels, radio shows and websites that support our interest.

This way we become members of  a "mind tribe", a group that thinks alike whose members continuously reaffirm their particular view of the world.  These tribes live in different physical locations, but mentally, they share the same space and interpret facts in their unique way.  Mind tribes do not play well with each other.  They either totally ignore each other when their tastes are radically different, or they engage in brutal opinion warfare, like among the political or religious tribes.

We are losing our "mind cohesiveness" as a society.  We tend to interpret facts in more radically different ways now than we did twenty years ago.  We are also losing our ability to interact with people that are not precisely like minded in a constructive way.  Governing a nation is becoming more of a challenge as the art of negotiation and compromise starts feeling so twentieth century...  

My advice, leave your tribe once in a while, find something different and mingle.  The world would be a better place if we all did this.