Costly attentions: Governing the media multitasker

Abstract

While divided media attention predates our era, ‘multitasking’ arose only recently as a named behaviour within cultural consciousness. The growth in media multitasking – especially among adolescents and white-collar workers – runs parallel to intensified efforts by scientists, popular critics, and self-help gurus to dictate techniques of efficient media use. Drawing from Michel Foucault's writings on governmentality and lectures on neoliberalism, this paper investigates these attempts to govern multitasking habits as central to work and play in late capitalist society. Specifically, I examine how multitasking acts as self-work under neoliberalism, as more individuals draw from market logic to rationalize themselves as social beings. My goal is to alert scholars within media and cultural studies – who habitually theorize media attention as undivided – to the emergence and importance of ‘multitasking’ in understanding contemporary mediated subjectivity.

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been possible without the guidance and advice of Laurie Ouellette. I also want to extend thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, which greatly helped the clarity and comprehensiveness of my argument, and to Allyson Shaffer, who directed me toward some of the literature on office culture.