Jamie Mack's List: Information Overload

• "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" (Penguin Press: 244 pp., $25.95)

• • There is actually a Center for Internet Behavior, who knew?
• He believes that some services available over the Internet have unique psychological properties which induce dissociation, time distortion, and instant gratification
• Center for Internet Behavior

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• The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you're doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It's an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.

• The challenge is that each of those social media involvements can represent another virtual in box, with an implicit assumption that you should think about and deal with what lands there. If "processing" those additional streams of input is simply a matter of scanning to see what's of interest to you, that may not take much time; and you can simply drop in and out on a whim. That's no different than channel surfing, other than the added seductiveness of interactive rabbit trails to pursue.