All in all, we’d be a lot better off if we left the cultural soothsaying to people who are trained to do so. If it’s the academic’s job to identify and predict social trends, it’s the journalist’s job to display how those trends affect individuals on the personal level. Distacted, Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson’s screed against the A.D.D. generation, runs into all the problems you’d expect when a journalist tries to play sociologist. Jackson’s supporting evidence is overwhelmed with anecdotal and introspective evidence. She overemphasizes points that marginally support her argument and ignores all evidence to the contrary. Her use of academic theory is flimsy and oversimplifying. It’s clear that Jackson went into Distracted to make a prescriptive argument, rather than try to discover whether that argument was valid.
The argument Jackson tries to make is one we have heard all before. The Internet, in its fragmented text and its natural inclination to make us multitask, has caused us to turn away from more serious, informed research. We no longer want to read the sacred, magical book, but would rather get our texts through websites and readable in under 30 seconds. She combines this with a reduction in family time, the loss of trust, and the rise of humanoid robots as a sign of an impending dark age. In a book meaning to pander to grandparents and frustrated conservative mothers, Jackson stops short of referring to “The Google” and “The Youtubes,” but she may as well have gone that far. Something tells me she didn’t promote Distracted on Twitter.
A cruel irony of Distracted is that Jackson’s writing style violates the larger points she is trying to defend. Jackson can’t stay on one topic for more than a couple of pages, constantly going off on tangents and non-sequiturs before fully fleshing out her arguments. As a result, her argument borders on incoherence. There’s little to no connection from one anecdote to another. Each chapter serves more as a collection of vaguely related trains of thought instead of building the disciplined informed approach Jackson seems to be advocating. In fact, the struggle to follow Jackson’s line of reasoning actually makes her point better than anything she writes in the book. But Distracted is not a smart enough book for that effect to be intentional.
At least in the book’s introduction, Jackson makes her argument clear: with the eroding of attention and human dedication to detail and nuance, we could be heading for another dark ages. The definition of “dark ages” is extremely loosey-goosey and probably more historically normative than any academic would prefer - but hey! It sells. To be fair, in her explanation she does make the correct observation that technical advancement is not equivalent to intellectual Enlightenment.
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