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"The increasing popularity of media multitasking is frequently reported in national surveys while laboratory research consistently confirms that multitasking impairs task performance. This study explores this apparent contradiction. Using dynamic panel analysis of time series data collected from college students across 4 weeks, this study examines dynamic reciprocal impacts of media multitasking, needs (emotional, cognitive, social, and habitual), and corresponding gratifications. Consistent with the laboratory research, cognitive needs are not satisfied by media multitasking even though they drive media multitasking in the first place. Instead, emotional gratifications are obtained despite not being actively sought. This helps explain why people increasingly multitask at the cost of cognitive needs. Importantly, this study provides evidence of the dynamic persistence of media multitasking behavior."
"This is easy to parody: one friend summarized the argument as, You're not the tech industry's bitch, you just don't know when to stop being awesome, which maybe is taking things a bit far. (Though one commenter's point that this might not be, but "'fear' of being dispensable" is also a good one.)
But I think there are a couple valuable things embedded in Perlow's study that I think are worth drawing out.
First, it seems to me that people aren't addicted to success, but to the feeling of success. There is an important difference."
"The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. "
"Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today's information age."
"One of the questions I've been working through in my book is this: how do you decide when it's okay to outsource a cognitive function? When is it okay to let your electronic address book remember all your phone numbers, for example? When should you try to memorize a street address, rather than let your GPS or iPhone remember it for you.
I think the simple answer is this. Will memorizing the information help you survive a Zombie Apocalypse?"
"Consider, to give a more general example, e-mail. There are no shortage of strong arguments that living your day in your inbox prevents long, uninterrupted thought, which in turn greatly reduces the value of what you produce and the rate at which your skills improve.
Nicholas Carr almost won a Pulitzer last year for his book on this phenomenon, The Shallows, which was based on his earlier Atlantic article, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.
So why hasn’t there been any major changes to how American organizations use e-mail? The convenience principle stops them.
If you subscribe to this principle, all it takes to argue back against a critic like Carr is a list of examples where restricting e-mail in any way would lead to inconvenience."
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But here’s the thing: he’s busier than you and me, yet he’s doing just fine without e-mail. It hasn’t stopped him from accomplishing his professional goals or living an interesting life.
With this in mind, I implore you to shut the door, pull the blinds, and ask yourself, softly, the following question…
What would happen if you lived life without e-mail?
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I don’t know what to make of this thought experiment. Should we really turn back the clock on such a powerful innovation? Would we really want to? I don’t know. But Professor Lightman’s example does make one thing clear: regardless of how you personally feel, the e-mail zero lifestyle is possible. If you live in your inbox, it’s a choice you’re making; a choice you could reverse.
"The trick isn't to unplug from our devices -- it's to unplug from the distractions, information overload, and trash that make us unhappy."
When it works, collaboration is an amazing and explosive experience. Unleashing the synergy of a team of co-learners creates an avalanche of insight and output. The biggest problem with collaboration isn’t bossiness or proselytizing.
It’s overwhelm.
"All of this is to say that new statistical techniques, especially ones that become settled conventions, solve problems in info-glut. These solutions encode particular choices about what features of the world to emphasize – for example, assuming normal distributions makes us think in terms of mean and variance, and not so much about “fat tails”, a problem for modern finance (see MacKenzie’s work). Our modern iteration of this centuries old problem is only different in quantity not in kind. The proliferation of kinds of data awaits new methods for simplifying it. Info-glut, in other words, is relative to the advance of statistical methods that become taken-for-granted and institutionalized."
"Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we're usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. "
"All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home."
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What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. (I’ve felt this myself, writing anonymously on hockey forums: it is easy to say vile things about Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., with a feeling of glee rather than with a sober sense that what you’re saying should be tempered by a little truth and reflection.) Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.
A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.
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