WARNING: This introduction was written while watching an Argentinean soccer game, with a French newscast running in another browser window, “The Only Living Boy in New York” playing on iTunes, and an IM conversation with a friend in Kansas re:lunch happening on the side.

Multitasking seems inexorably tied to modern technologies of communication, information, work and entertainment, but is really really that novel? If you define it as paying (and dividing) attention between multiple information sources, then it might be argued that multitasking has always been in us. A hunter in the forest, a woman running a household, a farmer in the field, all multitask—paying attention to a multitude of sounds, smells, tactile and visual cues, always ready to notice significant changes in any one of them. Priests and shamans and ascetics have always had to take extraordinary efforts to mediate and minimize certain streams of input for the sake of others.

But modern multitasking, centered around electronic devices, can make what came before seem subtle and focused in comparison. Is it because the information and interaction no longer seem connected to our present environment? (But that’s only half true; staring at our screens, tapping out our alphabets, we’re still responding and reacting in the real world of light and sound and touch.) Maybe it’s the rates of change in the available technology, and our human ways of responding, interacting, creating and destroying in relation to it, that robs us of the accumulated wisdom involved in the multitasking of old.

Critiques of present-day multitasking are that it is both unwise (driving while texting) and ineffective (never focusing on one thing long enough to come up with a coherent thought). What do you think? What do today’s (and tomorrow’s) multitasking make of the world?

—Nate Barksdale