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By Root 843 0

boredom and distraction was demonstrated elegantly in 1989, by psychologists at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ninety-one undergraduates, broken up into small groups, were played a tape-recorded reading of fifteen minutes in length, but during the playback for some of the students a modest distraction was introduced: the sound of a TV soap opera, playing at a “just noticeable” level. Afterward, when the students were asked if their minds had wandered during the recording, the results were as to be expected. Seventy percent of the intentionally distracted listeners said their minds had wandered, as opposed to 55 percent of the control group. What was far more surprising, however, were the reasons they gave: among those whose minds wandered, 76 percent of the distracted listeners said this was because the tape was “boring,” versus only 41 percent of their non-distracted counterparts. We tend to think of boredom as a response to having too few external stimuli, but here boredom was perceived more keenly at the precise time that more stimuli were present.

The experiment’s authors, Robin Damrad-Frye and James Laird, argue that the results make sense in the context of “self-perception theory”: the notion that we determine our internal states in large part by observing our own behavior. Other studies have supported this general idea. Subjects asked to mimic a certain emotion will then report feeling that emotion. Subjects made to argue in favor of a statement, either through a speech or an essay, will afterward attest to believing it. Subjects forced to gaze into each other’s eyes will later profess sexual attraction for each other. In the case of boredom, the authors write, “The reason people know they are bored is, at least in part, that they find they cannot keep their attention focused where it should be.” That is, they ascribe their own inattention to a deficiency not in themselves, or in their surroundings, but in that to which they are supposed to be attending.

Today, in the advanced stages of our information age, with our e-mail in-boxes and phones and instant messages all chirping for our attention, it is as if we are conducting Damrad-Frye and Laird’s experiment on a society-wide scale. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, has found that white-collar officeworkers can work for only eleven minutes, on average, without being interrupted. Among the young, permanent distraction is a way of life: the majority of seventh- to twelfth-graders in the United States say that they “multitask”—using other media—some or even most of the time they are reading or using the computer. The writer and software expert Linda Stone has called this lifestyle one of “continuous partial attention,” an elegant phrase to describe the endless wave of electronic distraction that so many of us ride. There is ample evidence that all this distraction impairs our ability to do things well: a psychologist at the University of Michigan found that multitasking subjects made more errors in each task and took from 50 to 100 percent more time to finish. But far more intriguing, I think, is how our constant distraction may be feeding back into our perception of the world—the effect observed among those Clark undergraduates, writ large; the sense, that is, that nothing we attend to is adequate, precisely because nothing can escape the roiling scorn of our distraction.

This, finally, is what kills nanostories, I think, and what surely killed the flash mob, not only in the media but in my own mind: this always-encroaching boredom, this need to tell ever new stories about our society and ourselves, even when there are no new stories to be told. This impulse itself is far from new, of course; it is a species of what Neil Postman meant in 1984 when he decried the culture of news as entertainment, and indeed of what Daniel Boorstin meant in 1961 when he railed against our “extravagant expectations” for the world of human events. What viral culture adds is, in part, just pure acceleration—the speed born of more data sources,