Media multitasking: Seeking abundance or avoiding depth?

Not unrelated to my experience of returning to reading newspapers in print, and inevitably comparing them to digital news sources, is some recent research on student learning in the classroom. Summarized nicely in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, one of the key questions boils down to this: Is media multitasking driven by a desire for new information or a wish to avoid hard thinking? While there's predictably no clearcut answer, the implications of that research on attention and distraction, analytical thinking and memory, seem relevant to a range of other settings and information. Perhaps including news.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/