This link has been bookmarked by 126 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Jul 2008, by Sirchy A.
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30 Aug 11
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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.
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18 Mar 11
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12 Feb 11
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We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are
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chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking
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Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.
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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
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One irony that lies behind all this is the myth that children are good at this stuff. Adults often joke that their 10-year-old has to fix the computer. But it’s not true. Studies show older people are generally more adept with computers than younger
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27 Jan 11
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28 Jun 10
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10 Feb 10
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08 Jan 10
ken ."I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from di
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06 Jan 10
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I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”.
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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.
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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.
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“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,”
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18 Dec 09
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27 Sep 09
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18 Sep 09
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03 Jun 09
j wintherOn the train to Wakefield, with my new 3G iPhone, distracted from distraction by distraction, I saw the future and, to my horror, it worked.
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01 May 09
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08 Feb 09
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02 Dec 08
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20 Nov 08
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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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05 Sep 08
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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.
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Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.
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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.
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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”.
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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”.
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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. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Ftechnology.timesonline.co.uk%2Ftol%2Fnews%2Ftech_and_web%2Fthe_web%2Farticle4362950.ece
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,”
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economic forces involved. People make big money out of distracting us.
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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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Seb Paquethe 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
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Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson
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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.
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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.
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“As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”
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Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.
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28 Jul 08
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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’”.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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People make big money out of distracting us. So what can be done?
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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.
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90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.
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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.
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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.”
-
“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.
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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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24 Jul 08
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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
Bookmarks culture technology google internet learning occam distraction health delicious
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
-
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”.
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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”.
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All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.
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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.
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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”.
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Chris BrownTimesOnline UK editorial 07-20-2008
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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.
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Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
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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.
-
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
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Robert CravenIs distraction the norm? When you really need to dig into something and focus, then get away. Just as you left the dorm room in college to study, turn off the email and IM when getting ready to work on something requiring serious thinking. Anyone else rea
21st technology world writing google education learning distraction culture
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peoplesbrainsContinuing on Nicholas Carr's “Is Google making us stupid?” article
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