I cribbed the title from Slashdot since it was so funny. Many many news sources last spring carried the story of research on IM, chat, and email as intellect-wasting habits. News today (not likely to be so widely covered) of the fact that the research the headlines were based on wasn't quite so damning. One weblog that criticized the early press coverage now has a more in-depth analysis (and apology), including some comments from Glenn Wilson, one of the primary researchers covered extensively in the original story.
This "infomania study" has been the bane of my life. I was hired by H-P for one day to advise on a PR project and had no anticipation of the extent to which it (and my responsibility for it) would get over-hyped in the media.
There were two parts to their "research" (1) a Gallup-type survey of around 1000 people who admitted mis-using their technology in various ways (e.g. answering e-mails and phone calls while in meetings with other people), and (2) a small in-house experiment with 8 subjects (within-S design) showing that their problem solving ability (on matrices type problems) was seriously impaired by incoming e-mails (flashing on their computer screen) and their own mobile phone ringing intermittently (both of which they were instructed to ignore) by comparison with a quiet control condition. This, as you say, is a temporary distraction effect - not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 S[ubject]s somehow became "80 clinical trials".
Since then, I've been asked these same questions about 20 times per day and it is driving me bonkers.
This tendency in science reporting has always bothered me. Although there have always been limitations to the scientific method, one thing it tries to be good at is decontextualizing issues in order to study them. Ok, there's a lot of value to that--it's limited, but if you can understand science within those limitations, it can be useful. But the first thing science reporting does, in major news media, is to blindly recontextualize the research, then make it a universal condition, then use it to apply blanket statements to extraordinarily wide contexts: IM is evil.
Even apart from Wilson's comments, I rarely saw anyone ask how it was that solving matrix problems while working in a busy environment was supposed to be generalizable to anyone except for, I guess, people who solve matrix manipulations at work. I know how to do matrix manipulations (an artifact of an undergrad major in math and computer science), and it's basically carrying around an enormous amount of information in short-term memory while you perform successive, detailed calculations on it. Exactly the sort of thing that interruptions play havoc with. But it's obviously not a day-to-day activity for most people. I'm sure those people out there, and I'm sure they're working hard in quiet little cubicles, but it's not a focal point or part of the job description for most people.
(I hope I haven't offended anyone who does matrix manipulations for a living.)
[via Slashdot]
Posted by johndanseven at September 26, 2005 11:01 PM