Strategically Communicating

As I read the first six chapters of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, I was, of course, concerned about the degradation of the human mind that he posits. And, I can support his arguments about shrinking attention span and the way in which we bounce from one half-finished article to another, with many examples from my own life. For example, as I sit down to write this blog post I am fending off the urge to bounce around from news sites to facebook to clothing store websites.

But, as someone who has recently spent a great deal of time looking for a job, I also wonder if this incessant multi-tasking offers any sort of benefit or marketable skill. Multi-tasking in the traditional sense is certainly a desirable skill, and so I wonder, is there any way in which how our brains appear to be becoming addicted to constantly seeking new information and juggling lots of information at a time, can help us in the work place? Is hyper-multi-tasking a marketable skill? Similarly, for the journalists in this class, when we cover stories, there are often a great number of factors to keep track of, is it possible that the ways in which our dependence on the internet has trained our brains to constantly seek and juggle new information can help us?