Divided attention among Pomos
Multi-tasking (Postmodern) teens
It comes as a surprise to no one that teenagers and kids involve themselves in more than one form of media at the same time. The extent of this multi-tasking has gotten a lot of press this week. A report presented at an Advertising Research Foundation workshop stated that 80 percent of teens regularly use more than one media type at a given time. You can read the details here, but I don’t view this with the same alarm the advertising industry does. Why? Modernists, whose entire view of life is based on order and logic, automatically assume that young people who do more than one thing at a time can’t possibly assimilate information while so doing. They define attention as undivided, but Pomos are different, and it’s vastly more than just “kids being kids,” because these teenagers have grown up with the technology that makes divided attention possible. How many Modernists, for example, are comfortable chatting simultaneously in seven different Instant Message conversations? It is foolish to underestimate the capacity of Postmoderns to function amid chaos, because it, not order, is their foundational perspective.
