i fear they may be right, altho they are using it to shore up their own ego more then apply a logical argument.

i fear that multitasking confuses people, especially when there is a gui involved so that one may never have a indication that anything is being done.

this is, i suspect, why viruses and so on work. people do not have the "sysadmin" attitude of looking at the task manager/top/whatever, and read up on the names of the entries listed.

i cant help wonder how many only have a spreadsheet or text document open on their desktop all day, and use the computer as a typewriter with unlimited correction fluid...

for them, a task going on in the background, could just as well be going on at the other side of the world, they would not know, or care, about the difference.

i ones read that elderly people, ones being shown the basics, found the command line of a unix environment informative. This mostly as they could tell when something was going in (no blinking cursor) and when a task was sent the the background, they would told it was waiting there when they did something else.

thing is, while our brain is a multiprocessing machine, it constantly scans sensory inputs for potential dangers, we are not aware of that. We are mostly focused on the one thing we are working on at the moment, and studies have shown that multitasking will actually degrade our performance more often then not, as it takes time for the brain to bring itself back up to speed about what was done on a task previously.

So when a teen is studying with music and tv on 11, its more about applying white noise to the senses, rather then distractions.

when one speak about a wish for multitasking on the iphone, what it seems one is often really asking for, is for the apps one leave, to remember their state, so that one can leave a ssh shell open, pop over to a pdf or web page, read up on some commands on wants to give, and then pop back into the ssh session to enter said commands. The iphone fails here, as it closes down the ssh session when one leave, and needs to be reconnected before one can continue (potentially dumping all one have done unless one is running screen at the other end).

so multitasking is more a case of telling the computer "hold that thought", then of really trying to do multiple things at the same time. At best, the other "tasks" are supplementing ones ability to do a "primary" task.

the thing is that while we are attempting to replace the secretary, librarian and other jobs with a computer, the people performing those jobs are potentially creative, and attempts at making the computer creative have so far been poor and annoying (clippy anyone?).