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Was there gridlock before there were automobiles? Was there jet lag before
there were airplanes? Who was the first person to say “I Googled it” or
“he's cyberstalking me”? At what moment did a “web log” turn into a
“blog”?
Language makes things official. Change in the pace of life over the last
decade can be measured by change in our vocabulary. We I.M., we get phished, we
have PIN's. We HotSync, therefore we are.
 Does a phenomenon fully exist until it has a name? Dr Edward M Hallowell
thinks not, and he knows more than a little about naming a trend into existence.
He was the first to name adult attention deficit disorder, or Adult A.D.D., back
in 1995, and now he is taking on the rest of modern life in “CrazyBusy:
Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World
Gone A.D.D.” (Ballantine Books, 2006). The frenzy of our wired world, he
argues, is giving nearly all of us the symptoms of attention deficit disorder.
To conquer the enemy, he says, we first need to name it.
So he has come up with the following suggestions, among others:
Screensucking: He defines it as
“wasting time engaging with any screen - for instance, computer, video game,
television, BlackBerry.” He goes on to use his new word in a sentence: “I
was supposed to write that article, but instead I spent the whole afternoon
screensucking.” That concept hits particularly close to home.
EMV, or E-Mail Voice: This, Dr
Hallowell writes, is “the unearthly tone a person's voice takes on when he
is reading e-mail while talking to you on the telephone.
Frazzing: Defined as
“multitasking ineffectively.” The term multitasking itself was originally
coined to describe what a computer does during the microseconds between
keystrokes. Then it came to mean something humans are proud to do. And when we
crash (also a computer term) while trying to multitask, we frazz.
The New York Times Page(s) 1
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