This link has been bookmarked by 68 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Jul 2008, by Sirchy A.
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08 Oct 08
Scott McCordOn Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages.
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19 Aug 08
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Multitaskers fool
themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output
deteriorates. -
Yet the rabidly
multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal. - 4 more annotations...
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“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist. -
Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the
great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. -
But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill
Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks.
They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”. -
Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled
with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.
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11 Aug 08
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09 Aug 08
Paul RyanThe digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate.
technology culture google attention distraction email search 1000shards
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But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s
caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that
interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This,
it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly
multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal. -
“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist. - 2 more annotations...
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“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute
distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But
psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide
the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben
describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the
contemporary predicament in a nutshell. -
cyber-serfs
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06 Aug 08
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02 Aug 08
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01 Aug 08
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31 Jul 08
David Feld"Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves."
web2.0 web internet online culture information technology psychology productivity social
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Carey ZIn an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. -
29 Jul 08
Edison MoraisA Geração Google se ocupa com coisas superficiais e não vive o que importa na vida,
antropologia humanidade atencao profundidade produtividade geracao
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Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness
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Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing
to think, to absorb. - 3 more annotations...
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“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” -
economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us. -
like all multitaskers, the kids are
deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact,
they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming
the surface of life. It takes an adult imagination to discriminate, to make
judgments; and those are the only skills that really matter.
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Distracted: The Erosion of
Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson -
No human being, he says, can
effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use
language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool
themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output
deteriorates. - 3 more annotations...
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Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly.
Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are,
in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air
traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even
irreversible brain damage. -
“As our attentional skills are squandered, we
are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger
between man and machine.” -
Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the
effect of reducing information intake.
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26 Jul 08
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In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is
Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us,
noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in
a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle.”
Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing
to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement
of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the
pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly
available’”. -
“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute
distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But
psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide
the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben
describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the
contemporary predicament in a nutshell. - 2 more annotations...
-
-
Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the
great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done? -
The computer is training us not to attend, to drown in the sea of information
rather than to swim. Jackson thinks this can be fixed. The brain is
malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained
to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and
propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to
turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.
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25 Jul 08
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if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even
legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose
the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your
caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you
imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your
sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others. -
In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is
Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us,
noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in
a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle.” - 6 more annotations...
-
-
“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist. -
People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done? -
The first issue is the determination of the distracters to create young
distractees. Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a
switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction
between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a
thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the
effect of reducing information intake. -
90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks.
They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”. -
Teenagers are being groomed to
think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or
some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another
through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come
to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless. -
This, for him, puts democracy at risk. It is a form of government that puts “a
heavy burden of responsibility on our citizens”. But if they think Paris is
in England and they can’t find Iraq on a map because their world is a social
network of “friends” – examples of appalling ignorance recently found in
American teenagers – how can they be expected to shoulder that burden?
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if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even
legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose
the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your
caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you
imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your
sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others. -
In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is
Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us,
noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in
a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle.” - 6 more annotations...
-
-
“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist. -
People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done? -
The first issue is the determination of the distracters to create young
distractees. Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a
switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction
between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a
thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the
effect of reducing information intake. -
90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks.
They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”. -
Teenagers are being groomed to
think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or
some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another
through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come
to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless. -
This, for him, puts democracy at risk. It is a form of government that puts “a
heavy burden of responsibility on our citizens”. But if they think Paris is
in England and they can’t find Iraq on a map because their world is a social
network of “friends” – examples of appalling ignorance recently found in
American teenagers – how can they be expected to shoulder that burden?
-
-
-
24 Jul 08
Rem PalpittThe digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate
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They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done?
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Gosia StergiosMore on the chronic distraction casued by Internet, Google and new mobile technologies
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Isaac PigottThe opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of mult
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Dave DuarteDescribes some of the issues around Attention deficity and losing out lives one distraction at a time.
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23 Jul 08
Patrick HigginsFrom the article:
The concern of all these writers and thinkers is that it is precisely these skills that will vanish from the world as we become infantilised cyber-serfs, our entertainments and impulses maintained and controlled by the techno-geek aristocracy. They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it. -
Clive McGoun"Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustainin
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beth filarwilliamsStoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate -
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But, listen carefully, it’s
killing me and it’s killing you. -
is that we now go outside of ourselves to
make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.
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Stoooopid
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22 Jul 08
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David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995
his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s
speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another.
Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might
one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes
naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define
ourselves -
One American study found that
interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This,
it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. - 2 more annotations...
-
-
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just
written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation
of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book.
And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb. -
Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the
great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done?
-
-
-
Tara McGowanGreat article tying Jackson's Distraction to Carr's Google article and making broader conclusions about how we are changing as our attention diminishes.
attention brainresearch brain google Carr MaggieJackson distraction youth socialnetworking cognition social
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David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995
his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s
speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another.
Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might
one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes
naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define
ourselves. -
No human being, he says, can
effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use
language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool
themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output
deteriorates. - 11 more annotations...
-
-
One American study found that
interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This,
it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. -
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just
written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation
of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. -
“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist. -
Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us -
Tests clearly show that a
switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction
between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a
thousandfold. -
90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks.
They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”. -
They are “living off the thrill of
peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic
inheritance that has made us what we are now”. -
All internet
connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world
interactions. This is concealed by the language. -
Teenagers are being groomed to
think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or
some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another
through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come
to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless. -
ike all multitaskers, the kids are
deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact,
they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming
the surface of life. -
what is new is the assiduity
with which companies and institutions are selling us the tools of
distraction. Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled
with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.
-
-
-
-
Robert FairbairnI wonder if being online with SAAS, etc.. will make this worse?
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21 Jul 08
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Anne BubnicThe digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate.
-
Distracted: The Erosion of
Attention and the Coming Dark Age -
Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might
one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes
naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define
ourselves. - 2 more annotations...
-
-
Multitaskers fool
themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output
deteriorates. -
Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are,
in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air
traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even
irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s
caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that
interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day
-
-
-
20 Jul 08
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