why are we surprised that multitasking sucks?

Just a short post this week: Here's a story [http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090824/tc_nm/us_multitasking_stanford] about some of the negative impacts of media multitasking as seen by a recent Standford study. Here's the gist: Compulsive media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention, worse at organizing information, and worse at quickly switching between tasks (italics mine), the Stanford scientists wrote. While their conclusions don't surprise me, I am surprised that this kind of stuff is even news - there's a certain amount of obsessive focus that accompanies real results. Not to mention, similar articles [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/business/yourmoney/25shortcuts.html] have appeared before. But I guess we didn't notice or remember due to our collective multitasking.