BOOK REVIEW: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

By Maggie Jackson 
Prometheus Books, 2008, $25.95

The Old English meaning of the term "distraction" is "to tear apart," and author Maggie Jackson suggests that our current inability to sustain focus, connect, and develop shared memory is tearing apart our culture to the degree that she warns that we may be on the cusp of another Dark Age. "Only a society rich in memory and reflection can hope to build a culture of creativity, vision, and care," she states, averring that the splintering of focus demanded by the continuous interruptions of instant-messaging, the state of being always available made possible by the ubiquitous cell phone, and the preference by many for a virtual reality as opposed to person-to-person interactions is creating a society characterized by the erosion of "the most crucial building-block of wisdom, memory, and ultimately the key to societal progress" - attention.

Maggie Jackson, a former foreign columnist and national correspondent for the Associated Press, is an award-winning author and journalist and writes a column for the Boston Sunday Globe. She has contributed to the New York Times and Working Mother and is the author of What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age.

"We are on the cusp of an astonishing time, and on the edge of darkness . . . We now hold the potential to know, shape and utilize a full quiver of attentional skills to combat a spreading culture of distraction . . . We can create a culture of attention, recover the ability to pause, focus, connect, judge, and enter deeply into a relationship or an idea, or we can slip into numb days of easy diffusion and detachment." Jackson says that the choice is ours, but the first step in making any choice is the awareness that we need to make one, and this important book sets the alternatives before us with a call to action that we resist at our peril.