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Nebul.us: Visualizing (and Sharing) your Online Activity - information aesthetics
"Nebul.us is a new startup focusing on revealing the online activities of users through the interactive visualization of Internet usage patterns in real-time. It aims to become a social site for sharing content with friends (or to the public at large), or a productivity enhancing site for figuring out how one is spending time online.
After installing a browser plugin, the service will start monitoring the browsing history. Typical Web2.0 profiles like Facebook, Twitter, last.fm or YouTube can be added as well to complete the view of online activities (note that the initial setting is set to 'private', and information about visits to individual sites can also be shared with 'friends' or blocked). "
Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker."
YouTube - Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price
Video of Class Nass, Eyal Ophir, explaining research: "Think you can watch videos, make cell phone calls and send e-mails all at once? Stanford experts say even trying can impair your cognitive control. Communication professor Cliff Nass and researcher Eyal Ophir explain why."
Larva Labs - Breathpacer
"BreathPacer is a powerful breathing guide that can help you reduce stress and experience deep relaxation. Andrew Weil, a leader in the integrative health field, states, "If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly."
Research has shown that practicing therapeutic breathing creates profound mental and physiological changes in the body. It is an extremely effective treatment or adjunctive treatment for numerous disorders. Use BreathPacer for 10-20 minutes a day and see what happens. For the price of a good cup of coffee, you can reduce stress and stress related illness while achieving a deeply relaxed state."
The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com
"Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom. "
Goldhaber
If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
Linda Stone: Just Breathe: Building the case for Email Apnea
"s the email spills onto my screen, as my mind races with thoughts of what I'll answer first, what can wait, who I should call, what should have been done two days ago; I've stopped the steady breathing I was doing only moments earlier in a morning meditation and now, I'm holding my breath.
And here's the deal. You're probably holding your breath, too.
I wanted to know - how widespread is "email apnea*?" I observed others on computers and Blackberries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes -- the vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, and noticed that most were mouth-breathing and hyperventilating. Consider also, that for many, posture while seated at a computer can contribute to restricted breathing.
Does it matter? How was holding my breath affecting me?
I called Dr. Margaret Chesney, at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Research conducted by Chesney and NIH research scientist, Dr. David Anderson, demonstrated that breath holding contributes significantly to stress-related diseases. The body becomes acidic, the kidneys begin to re-absorb sodium, and as the oxygen (O2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitric oxide (NO) balance is undermined, our biochemistry is thrown off. "
Linda Stone: Why Email Can Be Habit-Forming
"How does screen time contribute to chronic stress? In February 2008, I wrote about email apnea. It's the term I coined for the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing humans tend to do while at ANY screen: computer, mobile device, video game or television. Our screen posture is generally compromised, making it challenging to get a diaphragmatic breath. The emotion of anticipation, accompanied by an inhale, is a natural response to a flood of email or a tense moment in a video game.
We forget to exhale. It's the exhale that contributes to the reduction of the stress response and the heightening of the relaxation response. More breathing, less chronic stress and less compulsive consuming."
Sentient Developments: Cognitive liberty and right to one's mind
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Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one's mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it's also very much about the right to not have one's mind altered against their will. In this sense, cognitive liberty is very closely tied to freedom of speech. A strong argument can be made that we have an equal right to freedom of thought and the sustained integrity of our subjective experiences.
Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain 'mind-types'. We once tried to "cure" homosexuality with conversion therapy. Today there's an effort to cure autism and Asperger's syndrome -- a development the autistic rights people have railed against. And in the future we may consider curing criminals of their anti-social or deviant behaviour -- a potentially thorny issue to be sure.
There are many shades of gray when it comes to this important issue. It's going to requiring considerable awareness and debate if we hope to get it right. Your very mind may be at stake.
"
The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking
challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, and several states have made that form of multitasking illegal
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In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”
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Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.”
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Technology Makes Us Faster; Addicted to Speed - The New York Times
"New technologies, in living rooms and in editing studios, are helping to drive the pace of art and entertainment -- just as they are driving the pace of virtually everything else in our work lives and our leisure time."
Can You Hear Me Now? - Forbes.com
tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.
Here I offer five troubles that try my tethered soul.
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Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated
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I have traveled 36 hours to a conference on robotic technology in central Japan. The grand ballroom is Wi-Fi enabled, and the speaker is using the Web for his presentation. Laptops are open, fingers are flying. But the audience is not listening. Most seem to be doing their e-mail, downloading files, surfing the Web or looking for a cartoon to illustrate an upcoming presentation. Every once in a while audience members give the speaker some attention, lowering their laptop screens in a kind of digital curtsy.
In the hallway outside the plenary session attendees are on their phones or using laptops and pdas to check their e-mail. Clusters of people chat with each other, making dinner plans, "networking" in that old sense of the term--the sense that implies sharing a meal. But at this conference it is clear that what people mostly want from public space is to be alone with their personal networks. It is good to come together physically, but it is more important to stay tethered to the people who define one's virtual identity, the identity that counts. I think of how Freud believed in the power of communities to control and subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun comes to mind: "virtuality and its discontents."
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Podcast Episode: Buddhist Geeks: This is Your Brain on Meditation (Seriously Buddhist, Seriously Geeky
Podcast and transcript: This week we speak with academic nuerologist and Zen practitioner James Austin. Austin, who wrote the well-known book, Zen and the Brain, joins us to explain some of the physical mechanisms underlying both attention and the way we process reality. In terms of attention, he shares with us a very descriptive difference between "top-down" and "bottom-up" modes of attention. He also shares the difference, from the perspective of the brain, between self-centered (egocentric) processing and other-centered (allocentric) processing.
He also shares the ways in which these two are related to the different forms of meditation that are commonly seen in the Buddhist tradition. Although sometimes technical, his descriptions are extremely interesting for those who have an interest on the intersection between meditation and the brain.
Meditation found to increase brain size
People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.
Steve Lambert » SelfControl
Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application, by deleting the application, or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out.
Human multitasking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Human multi-tasking or multitasking is the performance by an individual of appearing to handle more than one task at the same time. The term is derived from computer multitasking. An example of multitasking is listening to a radio interview while typing an email. Some believe that multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching and apparently causing more errors due to insufficient attention. Other research illustrates our brains are capable dealing with certain 'dual multiple tasks' at the same time.
Gloria Mark
Multi-tasking in the workplace: Over the last several years I have been studying the different ways that information workers experience disruptions in their work due to multi-tasking and interruptions. With students we have done field studies in the workplace where people's actions have been carefully measured (to the second). Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks (every three minutes on average) but they also switch continually among interactions in varied organizational contexts. These results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, we are exploring how IT can support information organization in a way consistent with a more natural way of organizing work, in terms of thematically connected units of work, or working spheres. Here are some publications:
Driven to Distraction - At 60 M.P.H., Office Work Is High Risk - Series - NYTimes.com
In 2006, for instance, researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, used brain imaging to show that multitaskers were less effective learners.
According to that research, a person focused on a single task remembers what he has learned using the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical to storing and recalling information.
But when that person multitasks — like trying to learn something new while driving — the brain relies more on the striatum, a part of the brain used more for learning motor skills.
The researchers concluded, “Don’t multitask while you are trying to learn something new you hope to remember.”
“The brain is fundamentally built to unitask,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, where he is also a co-director of a new automotive research laboratory.
That limitation can put drivers at a disadvantage if they are negotiating with someone who, say, is in an office and less distracted.
Driving, Mr. Nass said, taxes the parts of the brain that make it more difficult to appreciate nuances of a conversation. “A person is much more manipulatable when they’re behind the wheel,” he said.
Mr. Nass said that the counterproductive effects can linger after the ride. Research shows that the brains of heavy multitaskers can become so accustomed to hopping from task to task that they have trouble focusing on longer, more in-depth ones.
FRONTLINE: digital nation: living faster: split focus: the skill of the future | PBS
one minute fifteen second video
The Skill of the Future
In a word: multitasking.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC.
The Attention Question in Social Business | Socialwrite.com
A lot of thinking has gone on around the idea of Attention as a resource that should not be abused or depleted and it is certainly a productive way to think about it, but on the other hand we are constantly looking for more and more efficient ways to utilize that attention. Twitter is a more efficient use of attention through its smaller and faster messages, instant messaging increases the efficiency of many interactions, wikis make more efficient use of the attention paid to long form content, etc.
We may be falling for the fallacy that enables Jevons’ Paradox, and by doing so we may be pushing people to the limit of their capability, even though we intend the opposite.
The implications for Social Business
Enterprise 2.0 (and Web 2.0 in general) is a great example of technology increasing the efficiency of the consumption of a resource. By being social we are creating more efficient and useful filters and information sharing capabilities. Whether it is expertise location on an internal social network or the ease with which we can share family photos, we have more efficient ways than ever to interact with large groups of people.
And so there is a challenge for one of the fundamental assumptions of Enterprise 2.0: that increasing the efficiency with which people connect and collaborate will allow for emergent or unexpected outcomes.
Helping create emergent outcomes is core to what we do at Dachis Group, so we have been thinking about it a lot.
The challenge is this: by simply increasing the efficiency through which people connect and collaborate, we may paradoxically consume even more of their attention because it is now easier for them to connect with people. This can lead to a depletion of their ability to do useful things with their new connections because they will be too busy monitoring, maintaining and developing their networks.
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