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 enlarge | Author: Maggie Jackson
Creator: Bill Mckibben
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.98
Buy New: $14.94
You Save: $11.04 (42%)
New (37) Used (12) from $14.89
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 29952
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 327
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1591026237
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.0973
EAN: 9781591026235
ASIN: 1591026237
Publication Date: June 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not what I expected July 30, 2008
1 out of 11 found this review helpful
Read an article in the Boston Sunday Globe written by this author. She cited her book and I purchased and read it thinking it would help a teacher in dealing with kids who are easily distracted. Dry. Tough to read. Not worth the purchase. Sorry!
 An Unfocused Look at Extremes Followed by Encouragement to Meditate July 29, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Do you understand a society better by looking at the edges or at the middle? That's the fundamental question that any social scientist and author must answer. Ms. Jackson shows her journalist roots by making alarmist arguments about a "dark age" based on looking at the most extreme forms of inattention in society and extrapolating those extremes into a future where that's the norm. In doing so, she throws anecdote after anecdote pretty harmlessly against the wall.
Do you agree that quiet is better than too much noise? Do you think that being able to concentrate is something worth cultivating? Do you think that most of what's on the Internet is worthless junk? Are you interested in people staying focused so they can make better judgments? Do you find meditation helpful? If you said "yes" to those questions, you'll agree with this book . . . but you won't learn much that you didn't know already unless you read nothing about the way brains work. Even if you want to learn about brain physiology, this isn't a very good book.
I found the overstatement to be irritating, as well. Otherwise, I would have rated the book at three stars.
You can lead a person to education, but you can't make him or her think. that's always been a problem. The new context just adds color to the old dilemma.
 An intriguing story of... Oh, look! A chicken! July 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Distracted is the story of the function of attention. In nine chapters organized into three parts, Maggie Jackson takes us on a tour of the past, present, and possible future of our ability to pay attention. She begins with Part I ("Lengthening Shadows"), considering the landscape of our consciousness today. Jackson winds the calendar back to 1880 to examine a society that has become interrupt-driven. Her look at technology brings us through life in a virtual world, high-bandwidth information delivery, and how we have optimized our lives to work "on the go," rather than where we are.
In Part II ("Deepening Twilight") Jackson looks at surveillance, the use of technology to observe, and its impact on the observed. Moving on to how we process information, she writes about the history of speech and the history of writing. She then focuses on reading--not an act of nature, but one that we must undertake deliberately if we're to do at all. We're then taken into the world of "smart machines," computers and robots that display empathy and that give us the kind of personal attention that we seem incapable of getting from other humans.
Undoubtedly, distracted readers will fail to realize that the journey has taken them through two iterations of three critical components of thinking: focus, judgment, and awareness.
Part III ("Dark Times...Or a Renaissance of Attention?") introduces a lovely term, McThinking, and considers what happens to our ability to succeed, to plan, and even to reason when instead of assimilating information, we passively watch it fly before our eyes. We cannot synthesize one set of information that we don't know with another set of information that we don't know. Lacking engagement, we're unable to detect, much less to resolve, conflicts. Jackson concludes her discussion with "The Gift of Attention," looking at how science is showing that attention is not a fixed value doled out to each of us In The Beginning, but something that we can, through effort, develop.
Maggie Jackson's tour through attention and its absence is both timely and welcome. She engages in the valuable service of holding a mirror before us, showing us truly what we as a society have become. As was noted by Dr. Walter Gibbs in the 1982 movie Tron, intelligent machines and easy access to information can have surprising side-effects. "Won't that be grand?" he asked a brilliant young programmer. "The computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop!"
As anyone who has asked a simple question only to have the listener type the question into Google knows, there are many technology-dependent citizens among us, completely unable to do anything but regurgitate what the computer said. Far too many among us have become as useless as a crew member on the bridge of a spaceship in a science-fiction television series: unable to do anything but to ask the computer questions and to regurgitate the answers. (In fact, it's worse; the sedentary Google-surfers have none of the aesthetic value of the curvy crew member with the form-fit uniform.)
Kurt Vonnegut made a similar point in his 1961 short story, "Harrison Bergeron." The objective of that society was equality; everyone was equal in every way. Of course, this was merely a way of saying that the society was only as good as the worst of its members in every way. Those capable of greater thought were made equal to everyone else by having regular interruptions of their attention.
I am grateful to Maggie Jackson for her consideration of the topic of attention and suggest that anyone who cares about the future of our society give Distracted some much-deserved time and focus.
Disappointed July 25, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I was a little disappointed in this book. It's for the most part a long essay, and the author seems to meander quite a bit. I wouldn't have minded this if there had been a few deeply insightful moments, but most of the creative energy here is spent pointing out the obvious and then supporting the obvious with lots and lots and lots of quotes and citations. This is a sometimes well-written and interesting book, but it reads a bit like having a dinner conversation with one of your really intelligent friends. Nice for an evening of distraction, but I was hoping for considerably more in a book that came with such high praise.
A Product Of The Distracted Culture It Describes July 17, 2008
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
Sadly, DISTRACTED is a product of the culture it describes. The book is perfect for the easily distracted, skimming reader. In a word, it's shallow. If you're looking for something to powerfully address this important topic, something to fire up your neurons and take you deep -- this is not your book. Advice to all: get it through your local library.
The topics addressed in DISTRACTED are far better addressed in THE ATLANTIC's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" "Stoopid" is well organized, researched and written. It has a thesis. More: after reading it you may change your habits. DISTRACTED just leaves you hungry.
Disappointed. Felt like I'd wasted valuable time reading it closely.
Kirtland Peterson
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