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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, February 10, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black W hat's yo ur hu r r y ? Are you feeling a little...harried these days? Overworked? Rushed off your feet? Not enough hours in the day? It's not your imagination you really are busier than ever. You are processing about three times more information every day than you would have been in 1980. A study performed by researchers at the San Diego branch of the University of California shows that the avalanche of raw data cascading down upon us has more than tripled in the past thirty years. I have no trouble believing that. I am a Certified Old Guy. I actually remember what it was like in 1980 when there were no cellphones, no Blackberrys, no blogs or podcasts. It was another era. Most families could actually live on one salary, which usually meant that one spouse went out to a day job while the other - most often the wife got to stay home and attend to all the other 'day jobs' cooking, cleaning and kid control. It wasn't heaven on earth but it was definitely simpler. The information stream was pretty basic: Folks listened to the radio news at breakfast time, read the newspaper after dinner and maybe caught the ten o'clock telecast before they turned in. The rest of our 'information' was gleaned from gossip around the water cooler and over the back fence, reading the odd novel or two plus an occasional phone call from Aunt Agnes. Gone, along with Opie shuffling barefoot down to the fishin' hole. That University of California studied I mentioned earlier reckons we now spend about 70 percent of our waking hours simply consuming information. That works out to nearly twelve hours a day listening, watching or, more and more frequently, reading online 'data' which can range from porn to politics to a disquisition on Plato. And frequently these days we're doing it - watching, listening, reading and tweeting - all at once. It's become fashionable - even common - to absorb information from a variety of sources simultaneously. Kids routinely do their homework sprawled in front of the TV (or computer screen) while soundtracks from their MP3 players unspool in their ears. It's called multitasking. Adults do it too, with working lunches, listening to Vinyl Tap while answering email or driving with a BlueTooth headset gnawing at their temple. One idiot actually tweeted his wedding ceremony. So if we're taking in this ocean of information that our poor caveman ancestors back in 1980 didn't have access to, it follows that we're a lot smarter than those ignorant, unlettered slobs, right? Not right. Another study conducted by researchers at Stanford University discovered that in fact we're pretty mediocre when we multitask. People who do a lot of it end up with weaker memories and an inability to commit or focus on individual tasks. "The shocking discovery of this research," says communications researcher Clifford Nash "is that high-multitaskers are lousy at everything that's necessary for multitasking." Old-timers had a phrase for this condition. They called it an inability "to see the forest for the trees". That helps to explain how, despite having raised global economics to a fine science we could experience a worldwide financial meltdown that somehow, no agency, not our failsafe systems nor our vast array of brilliant financial wizards and gurus, could see coming. It also helps to explain how, with the world-shuddering spectre of climate change looming over us, the melting icecaps metaphorically lapping at our toes, we can continue to bicker and nit-pick like perfumed courtiers during the French Revolution, as to whether said change is really happening and whether it is 'man-made' or 'natural". And it helps to explain how an unhinged Muslim student in Nigeria, already flagged on a terrorist no-fly list, could buy a ticket and board a plane - without luggage -and fly across the Atlantic and half of North America to a point over the Great Lakes when, as his plane begins its descent into Detroit he stands up and tries to blow himself and his fellow passengers to smithereens. Perhaps the airport security staff was 'multitasking' when Mister Abdulmutallab slipped through . Maybe they were so fixed on confiscating bobby pins from a Nebraskan grandmother or a tube of Colgate toothpaste from a Winnipeg dry goods salesman that they failed to notice Mister Abdulmutallab was walking funny. You'd walk funny too if your Stanfields were packed with high explosives. Reminds me of a previous career I had at a radio station in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Part of my job was to read the newscasts at 4:30 and 5:30 PM. One day, after reading the 4:30 news I went out and watched firemen put out a fire in a building just down the street. When I read the 5:30 news there was no mention of a local fire. After I finished reading I went down to the news room to ask how come. The editor opened the news room door, letting out a bedlam of wire copy chattering, phones ringing and reporters yelling. Clearly annoyed at the interruption, the editor snapped "Fire? We didn't know there was a fire. Once we close this news room door we don't know what's going on out there."