Information-rich and attention-poor - The Globe and Mail - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Oct 09
  

  John Yeung

  information attention

• 27 Sep 09
  

  shaz rasul

  society culture information age attention span technology essay

• 23 Sep 09
  

  Vinnie Vrotny

  information attention research knowledge technology education learning 21stcenturyskills tbr

• 22 Sep 09
  

  Laurice Taitz

  information attention technology

• 20 Sep 09
  

  Elizabeth Best-Laurie

  information attention education research technology

• 

  Susan Nugent

  interesting article about how we may have so much information that we have become attention poor

  information attention technology education 21stcenturyskills learning knowledge

• 18 Sep 09
  

  Jim Daly

  Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.

  technology information attention

• 

  Lisa Spiro

  something

  information_overload

• 

  Brian Bedrick
  • The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth.
  • Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow moves on
• 17 Sep 09
  

  Demetri Orlando

  attention innovation intellect

  • hundreds of thousands of Web-empowered volunteers are able to very efficiently dedicate small slices of their discretionary time, the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell.
  • With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
• 

  Dana Buchanan

  information attention education technology learning

• 16 Sep 09
  

  Eric Calvert

  information attention education technology learning

  • With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
  • For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind. We appear to be seeing fewer of the great synthetic innovations associated with names like Newton, Einstein or Watson and Crick.

    • 

      Eric Calvert on 2009-09-16

      I'm not sure I agree with this assertion. The assumption is that the proliferation of content is leading us to "skim" a vast number of topics, but there's really no data presented to support this. I would guess that the 80/20 rule applies to most people's info consumption. I know I spend much of my time online reading about just a handful of topics that strongly interest me. The only difference now vs. 15 years ago is that I am drawing on more diverse sources.
      I also quibble with the argument that we are seeing less innovation than we did in the time of Newton or Einstein. I think it's harder for an individual scientist or inventor to stand out in part because there is so much invention and discovery going on that any one discovery or invention is less likely to be marveled at for an extended period of time. I also think that the Web has made research more collaborative, so when a great discovery comes along, it's more likely to be associated with a company, university, or government agency than a single individual. For example, mobile computing with ubiquitous network access is changing the world, but it's hard to point to one person and say "He/she invented it."
• 

  Dennis Richards

  i3cs21 eci831 eci831tools cck09 information attention 21stcenturyskills technology

• 15 Sep 09
  

  Laura Deisley

  attention 21stc information knowledge technology education

• 

  Diouma Diallo

  économie de l'attention et abondance d'info

• 

  bik3much ?

  attention scarcity data knowledge generation information data storage data transmission

• 

  Kathy Kaldenberg
• 14 Sep 09
  

  Tom March

  21stcenturyskills

• 

  Erithacus rubecula

  Information overload has meant a loss of attention to detail. It's not entirely clear that we're better off with too much information.

  H800 technology information_overload education

  • shift of emphasis from “depth” to “speed.” This is simply because depth and nuance require time and attention to absorb. So as attention has become the dominant scarcity, depth has become less “affordable.”
  • electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation
  • 3 more annotations...
  • • traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content
    • experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship
    • 

      • 

        Erithacus rubecula on 2009-09-14

        Previously though the same individuals were the 'sole' authority. So what has really changed here? More exposure perhaps.
• 

  Henk Nouwens

  Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

  aandacht informatie informatiemanagement information overload kennis

• 

  Rafael Parente

  greatarticle

• 

  amy monaghan

  Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision.

  ict

• 

  Sara Kajder

  attention digitalyouth methods digihum09

• 

  Kristin Day
• 

  Tami Brass

  Interesting read

  21stcenturyskills learning_styles send2blog

• 

  Julie Espinosa

  information news

• 

  Michele Brown

  impact of constant access to information

  • Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the
    Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds
    of those who learn to use it.” This is a striking example of a particular kind
    of generation gap in which masters of an established paradigm can only see the
    shortcomings, and not the potential, of the truly novel.
• 

  Phil Taylor

  information attention education research technology

• 

  Laura Doto
• 

  Rob Rankin

  htstaffning 21st century learning Education

• 

  Jocelyn Nadeau

  information attention

• 

  James Gates

  Very interesting read, I think

  information

  • For example, a recently announced storage technology using carbon nanotubes may allow digital information to be held without degradation for a billion years or more – an innovation that would eliminate the major shortcoming of the digital archive.
• 

  sapereaude80 sapere aude

  information attention howtoread

• 

  jaysen

  gtd time.management internet todo.read imported.delicious

• 

  Laurence Baker

  blog

• 

  Thomas Laigle

  Un article consacré à la transformation des modes de consommation et production de l'information

  information Internet attention

  • With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
  • For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.” This is a striking example of a particular kind of generation gap in which masters of an established paradigm can only see the shortcomings, and not the potential, of the truly novel.
• 

  skip zalneraitis

  information

• 

  Elizabeth Koh

  information digitalnatives future opinion

  • the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.
  • Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock.
  • 4 more annotations...
  • • growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds
    • With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
    • For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation.
    • The challenge is to adapt, and then to evolve, in a world where there continues to be an exponential increase in the supply of information relative to the supply of human attention.
• 

  Jason Coleman

  Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision.

  teaching students information technlogy

• 

  Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

  technology education media learning

• 

  Thomas Galvez

  education techintegration information data learning itgs itgs_education_articles

• 

  Justin Medved

  for:dharter for:mdil search

  • With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
  • Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.”
• 

  elizabeth helfant

  article

• 

  Howard Rheingold

  Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.
  
  The three technologies that have powered the information revolution – computation, data transmission and data storage – have each increased in capability (and declined in cost per unit of capability) by about 10 million times since the early 1960s. It is as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel, or if life expectancy had been reduced from 75 years to four minutes.
  
  This has unleashed a torrential abundance of data and information. But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention. The cost of one's time (approximated, for example, by the average wage) relative to the cost of data manipulation, transmission and storage has increased roughly 10-million-fold in just over two generations – a change in relative “prices” utterly without precedent. This, above all, is what is driving the evolution of online behaviour and culture, with profound implications for the production and consumption of knowledge. The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth.

  attention

  • Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.
    

    
    

    
    The three technologies that have powered the information revolution – computation, data transmission and data storage – have each increased in capability (and declined in cost per unit of capability) by about 10 million times since the early 1960s. It is as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel, or if life expectancy had been reduced from 75 years to four minutes.
    

    
    

    
    This has unleashed a torrential abundance of data and information. But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention.

• 

  Dean Shareski

  Technology information internet knowledge article newspaper tristateplp

• 13 Sep 09
  

  Jeffrey Plaman

  knowledge 21stcenturyskills techlearning information

  • Watson and Crick
  • Watson and Crick
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • Watson and Crick
    • Watson and Crick
    • Watson and Crick
    • Watson and Crick
    • Watson and Crick
    • Watson and Crick
• 

  Cindy Martin

  Globe & Mail essay on intellectual knowledge vs attention to depth of knowledge

  Infotech Web2.0 infoliteracy

• 12 Sep 09
  

  Harry Haller

  society education epistemology

• 

  Stewart Candelaria

  techno issue

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Erithacus rubecula on 2009-09-14
  Previously though the same individuals were the 'sole' authority. So what has really changed here? More exposure perhaps.
• 
  Eric Calvert on 2009-09-16
  I'm not sure I agree with this assertion. The assumption is that the proliferation of content is leading us to "skim" a vast number of topics, but there's really no data presented to support this. I would guess that the 80/20 rule applies to most people's info consumption. I know I spend much of my time online reading about just a handful of topics that strongly interest me. The only difference now vs. 15 years ago is that I am drawing on more diverse sources.
  I also quibble with the argument that we are seeing less innovation than we did in the time of Newton or Einstein. I think it's harder for an individual scientist or inventor to stand out in part because there is so much invention and discovery going on that any one discovery or invention is less likely to be marveled at for an extended period of time. I also think that the Web has made research more collaborative, so when a great discovery comes along, it's more likely to be associated with a company, university, or government agency than a single individual. For example, mobile computing with ubiquitous network access is changing the world, but it's hard to point to one person and say "He/she invented it."

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