Multitasking and news media

There was a recent story about people watching TV and surfing the web at the same time.

Here is one quote from the story:

“more women (77 percent) claim to multitask than men (73 percent). The average multitasker spends over 2.5 hours per week using the Web and TV at the same time, and the total time spent multitasking has surged by 19 percent over the past year, according to Nielsen.”

It reminded me of the research that Cliff Nass is doing at Stanford. He has been doing studies about high and low multitaskers which he says raises “implications for the future of the news media as well as media more generally.” You might have seen him talking about this topic in the Frontline documentary “Digital Nation“.

He has spoken on this topic to the Knight Fellows at Stanford and at conferences around the world.

Here are some of the themes that are important for news organizations to consider.

He has pointed out that classical psychology says multi-tasking is impossible but it is growing at an ever-faster rate.

Teenagers are leaders in multitasking.

Definition of media multitasking: Exposure to and use of unrelated media content. The key word is “unrelated”. Applies within technology as well as across technology.

He did not study non-media multitasking.

He says that there is physical multitasking (women may be better vs. men doing this) but with media multitasking there appears to be no difference between men and women.

Media multitasking In 2003, 25% of the time young people spent using one medium, they were concurrently using a second medium.

In 2009 80% plus!

The number of young people are using some form of media for fun while at the same time doing their homework has seen the same growth…2009 80% plus!

Why is multitasking growing? Nass thinks it has been growing for 100 plus years. As new media product or service appears…the first thing that happens is that it steals time from other activities. Movies took time from reading, radio took time from movies, and so on.

Media steals from non-media activities with the media time budget growing year after year.

He has created the term of horizontal use of time…with media it is easy to be in three places at once…so if we have media activities in parallel…and if we have more and more new media products being introduced, people have no choice, they have to multitask.

Media multitasking is becoming ubiquitous but humans have difficulty attending to multiple stimuli and cognitive bottlenecks allow one decision-making process at a time.

At the moment multitasking impedes performance:
Runner at the bottom of news screens
Facebooking while studying
Constant distraction while working…all hurt performance.

Nass believes one of the important conclusions to come out of his work so far is that no information product or service will be a primary focus of users and that multitasking is the dominant model of new media use.

With less attention being paid to any one media interaction, how do you design media…when research is so thin on multitasking?

Nass has said that one thing to consider is high multitaskers prefer new information to old. It may be that high multitaskers are explorers…they like breadth vs. depth. As you can imagine, Nass says that advertising people are very interested in this but I believe it is one of those topics hidden right in the open that newsrooms need to be aware of.

If you’d like more information on his work, you can check out this website.