Eideard

Multitaskers of media activities like watching YouTube, writing e-mail and talking on the phone are not very good at any of their tasks, according to a Stanford University report.

Researchers who published the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said the results had surprised them. They were looking for the secret to good media multitaskers but instead found broad-based incompetence.

“Heavy multitaskers are lousy at multitasking… The more you do it, the worse you get,” said Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass.

Compulsive media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention, worse at organizing information, and worse at quickly switching between tasks, the Stanford scientists wrote…

“We knew that multitasking was difficult from a cognitive perspective. We thought, ‘What’s this special ability that people have that allows them to multitask?’ … Rather than finding things that they were doing better, we found things they were doing worse,” Stanford symbolic systems professor Eyal Ophir said.

I wonder how this would play out in other cultures, other nations?

For example, nations without decades of dedication to ignoring commercials. Add that to MTV and Americans have the attention span of a cricket,

In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel. They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.

But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.

Now, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site…

Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking.

“We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety…

The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents overall in 2002.

The researchers also shelved a draft letter they had prepared for Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to send, warning states that hands-free laws might not solve the problem.

That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers’ focus off the road, studies showed…

At the time, Congress had warned the agency not to use its research to lobby states. Dr. Runge said transit officials told him he could jeopardize billions of dollars of its financing if Congress perceived the agency had crossed the line into lobbying.

Which would be hilarious if we weren’t talking about stupidity while driving and the deaths resulting. This took place in the bowels of a federal administration that made lobbying an Olympic-class sport, after all.

RTFA. If you’re concerned with surviving your daily drive to-and-from work, there’s not much new. Multitasking [what a misnomer] drivers put your own life at risk and they obviously could care less for their own dull glimmer of humanity.