Supafamous: Cooperative multiitasking
Comments: 4
Eric writes something that causes a small object to roll off a dusty table in a distant room in the servants’ quarters of a long-abandoned summer memory palace. The noise, half-caught, startles me to respond.
Maybe I like Macs because they’re like me. They can’t multitask (up till a few years ago). Like the Macs of old I can provide a reasonable facsimile of multitasking but in truth I can’t do it. I’m not one of those who can talk on the phone and hold an IM conversation at the same time. I can’t follow the game while chopping the veggies. It doesn’t work that way for me, I just lose track of it all, I can only handle 1 thing at a time. Yet people rarely notice this.
I’m the same, but people notice it with me all the time. I don’t have ‘huge frontal tables’ although I wish I did (I should check my spam: there’s probably a pill I can take).
It’s not a bad idea — send everything to 2 dimensions (or 2.5D if you’re a piler, like I am). Years of using computer interfaces based on desktop metaphors may well have prepared me for it. How has the spatial nature of the mental Finder evolved this last decade in response to the tools put in front of it?
For a while I tried the Cicerovian (sp?) method of constructing architecture to house thoughts, ideas, concepts, data, but it never really worked for me: I always wanted to stop in particular rooms and start decorating, and I’m not gay enough to accomplish this with the seamless élan and panache that augments the retrieval process instead of hindering it. One doesn’t speedily dispatch tasks at hand by standing there wondering what to do with the fireplace in a small north-facing corner of the mind.
At least I think it was Cicero who first beefed up that idea of memory palaces, if only by a few pages. I first heard of it in childhood when I’d yet to really acquire anything worth remembering, then came across it again later in Robert Harbison’s book Eccentric Spaces (which may be to armchair architects what Gödel, Escher, Bach is to Monday mathematicians). Thank heavens MIT Press is keeping it in print.
Eric goes on to explain hipster multitasking:
While I can’t run multiple threads at the same time I do have awesome load/store and read/write abilities. […] I can unload the data as quickly as I can load it so in order to provide the appearance of multitasking I load/unload tasks very rapidly.
Again, this is an illusion I’m still struggling to create, but at this point I think it’s time to admit the obvious: multitasking is bunk. None of us — not even women — really does more than one thing at a time. Multitasking is an illusion, and who conjurs this illusion best, best ‘multitasks’.
(Wasn’t there something written about this recently, an interview I meant to bookmark with a cognitive scientist in California (not Norman or Lakoff or anyone I’d heard of) who pooh-pooh’d multitasking, and quite convincingly?)
Which reminds me of a man I saw on television once. He had a job selling flowers on the streets of Manhattan, and he had developed a comic routine to attract an audience to whom he could sell his flowers. He was breathless and manic. “New York!” he said, “It’s the kind of town where you can’t ever just do one thing: you go out for dinner with friends and check out a new restaurant! You take the dog for a walk and rehearse some clever things to say at the gallery opening!”
Anyway, where was I? What I wanted to say is that the very concept of multitasking seems disrepectful to the tasks at hand. There’s that old Buddhist concept of attendance, that one should attend to the task at hand (note the singular noun), should pay attention, should be present. Anything worth doing is worth doing with zen mind, or at least well, and when the siren song of multitasking lures our attention into the sea of a million and one things, it’s our productivity that’s dashed against the rocks. The ability to confine one’s allusions to the same hemisphere suffers, too.
For me this is pretty much always.
Time for some frontal table exercises. I want to get huge.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2005.06.25 (Sat) • 16:39
Comments
Posted by Evan Jones 2005.06.26, 03:34
According to my dictionary, of course it’s only one of those old paper and ink varieties, the word is “Ciceronian”. According to Francis A. Yates, in the opening of The Art of Memory, there are “three Latin sources for the classical art of memory”, Cicero being the first, with his De oratore, and the others being first the anonymous author of Ad C. Herennium libri IV, and finally Quintilian in Institutio ortoria. The Yates book, by the way, is one of the recommendations for further reading at the bottom of the link you provided. It had sat completely forgotten on my bookshelf for many years, until this morning. Thanks for the wonderfully multidimensional post.
Posted by Marco A Morales 2005.06.28, 06:04
Multitasking is overrated, I think. When I was studying multimedia, many years ago now, I felt I was an amazing multitasker. Now I think i was surrounded by so many new toys, i couldn´t resist trying them all at the same time.
At the moment i´m a believer in extreme focusing. Like most people my generation, I lack time; gotta make the most of what I´ve got, and gotta make it good. To do so, it´s no use to spread the energy and stretch the time. I have to focus, concentrate, and dedicate all my might into the one task I have at hand in order to get it finished to the best of my ability. During whatever time it takes (a minute, a day, a month) everything else becomes redundant. it´s okay - it´ll still be there when i come back from my space-time bubble.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2005.07.05, 01:33
I’m old-fashioned enough still to be annoyed when people talk to me via their cell phones and move around doing who knows what. In my day, telephones were wonderful instruments that allowed you to curl up on the couch and talk in whispers to that special someone. It was almost better than being with them because they were in your head.
If you have to find diversion while talking to me, don’t bother. The only people I want to talk with are those who give me their full attention.
Posted by Robyn Miller 2005.07.20, 03:43
No one’s great at multitasking. Some are catastrophically bad at it. Like an old friend of mine, who always found himself in deep reverie. So much so that he was utterly unable to concentrate on menial tasks; his head was simply elsewhere. On three different occasions he drove away from gas stations, leaving the pump in his car (which can be a real bumber of a mess). Eventually I learned not to converse with him while driving down East Texas freeways. If I did, he’d forget to apply his foot to the gas pedal… I’d watch our rapidly decrease from 55 mph down to around 20, in no time at all.
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