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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."
"I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization."
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I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.
Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.
By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.
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This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.
Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.
"Rhizome.org’s annual “Seven on Seven” conference isn’t really meant to have a theme beyond simply exploring the intersection of art and technology. Rhizome director Lauren Cornell plays yenta, matching various figures from the two fields who then brainstorm collaborations and build whatever prototypes can be whipped up in the very abbreviated 24-hours they actually have together (the teams first meet Friday morning, then talk, hatch an idea, and finally present on Saturday afternoon). It was notable, then, that at this year's conference — held April 14 at the New Museum — a theme did emerge organically: Quite a few of these pairs, in one way or another, were responding to a sense that the quality of mental experience was on the decline in our over-wired world."
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Once upon a time, when I was overwhelmed by my reading load in college, I took a speed reading course. The conclusion I came to was that the tricks of speed reading were fine for absorbing raw information, but useless when it came to processing literature. In fact, I realized that literary language was almost specifically engineered to thwart anyone who is trying to relate to it in this way. So I gave up on speed reading. Yet pretty much all those tricks — reading an article out of order, scanning paragraphs as single blocks — are now how I naturally process the flood of emails and online articles I have to consume everyday for my job.
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Maybe our present-day glut of communication is just something we are becoming acclimated to, and we will all, in the future, be happily welded into our Google Glasses, Borg-like. Or maybe at some point, we'll suffer the mental equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, and society will realize that we need to regulate our exposure to technology before it completely dehumanizes us. (As David Auerbach puts it in a recent essay debunking the idea of computer intelligence, computers are not going to adjust to our humanity naturally, so if we don't engage with them critically, there can only be one result: "Their dumbness will become ours.") Or maybe — this is the third way, and the one that the Rhizome conference by nature defaults to — some soulful inventors will find a way to use technology against itself, creating applications that somehow help cure us of our info addiction without forcing us to go cold turkey.
"Whenever I bumped into a silo like Facebook, I may have grumbled but I didn’t leave. In fact, I pushed more content into it, not asking that it push content back out. I did that because that’s where the readers were, where I could get more users, etc…
When my smart phone provider decided to put a cap on how much bandwidth I could use on my unlimited plan, I didn’t leave because I had to be on a network where I could continue using my iPhone/iPad/Kindle/Whateverdevice. I grumbled on Twitter and may have done a tumblr post but I didn’t walk away.
When the politicians started talking about things like Net Neutrality or other weird acronyms like PIPA/SOPA/ACTA/etc I may have pushed back for that law but I didn’t make it clear that anything that attacks the Internet attacks the people and thus undermines democracy.
I think you may realize that I’m not alone in these behaviors and the truth is: I may have killed the internet… but so did you."
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You run a site on the open Internet? Well, first of all thanks. But remember that the tools we have is the Internet: Just don’t link to the public-facing pages of siloed sites. In fact, it might be best not to mention them but if you have to, make it hard to find them.
You’re just a user? Awesome. Just start demanding the internet remain open. You came out (or at least thought of doing so) when SOPA threatened the Internet. When your Telco decides to close things up, walk away from it and to a provider that promises to remain open. When politicians try to abuse the Internet, call them on it. And when a provider tries to lock you up, walk away. You can do it again and again. The fight is going to be a long one but it’s well worth it.
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When there are no more printing presses -- when the books are gone, when all old knowledge has been digitized, and all new knowledge is digitally distributed -- then there will be only one way to access powerful and empowering knowledge, a way that is mediated (and monitored and limited) by corporations and governments who develop and control the proprietary delivery systems of all things digital. Who controls that technology? Who designs those tools? For whom will they be made available, and under what conditions? Who will guarantee texts a place on the grid, and who will guarantee us access to the grid as readers? And who will assure us that even if the grid goes dark, and stays dark for far too long, we can still access the knowledge embedded in those unreadable digital files?
Or will digital texts become the new hieroglyphics, faint scratchings on the pedestal of a vast colossal wreck of a culture that unwisely abandoned a well-worn instrument of liberation: printed words on a page, "portable property," books simply -- but not always safely -- passed from one hand to another.
"The trick isn't to unplug from our devices -- it's to unplug from the distractions, information overload, and trash that make us unhappy."
The US financial markets have suffered over 18,000 extreme price changes caused by ultrafast trading, according to a new study of market data between 2006 and 2011
Facebook's impending problem is that even if the company enables future pacemakers to share our every heartbeat, the company cannot automate caring—the most important part of the feedback loop that has driven the social Web's ascent. Nothing can support exponential growth for long. No matter how cleverly our friends' social output is summarized and highlighted for us, there are only so many hours in the day for us to express that we care. Today, the law of social sharing is a useful way to think about the rise of social computing, but eventually, reality will make it obsolete.
"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. "
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
"To Prevail is to accept that our technological tools are changing how our humanity expresses itself, but not changing who we are. It is to know that such changes are choices we make, not destinies we submit to. It is to recognize that our technologies are manifestations of our culture and our politics, and embed the unconscious biases, hopes, and fears we all carry — and that this is something to make transparent and self-evident, not kept hidden. We can make far better choices about our futures when we have a clearer view of our present.
To Prevail is to see something subtle and important that both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution often miss: our technologies will, as they always have, make us who we are.
Human plus a Computer equals a Human."
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Western intellectual culture is in the midst of a civil war between two superficially distinct viewpoints: a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization, eliminating our humanity even if they don’t simply destroy us, versus a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization and replace it (and eventually us) with something better. We’re on the verge of disaster or the verge of transcendence, and in both cases, the only way to hang onto a shred of our humanity is to disavow what we have made.
But these two ideas ultimately tell the same story: by positing these changes as massive forces beyond our control, they tell us that we have no say in the future of the world, that we may not even have the right to a say in the future of the world. We have no agency; we are hapless victims of techno-destiny. We have no responsibility for outcomes, have no influence on the ethical choices embodied by these tools. The only choice we might be given is whether or not to slam on the brakes and put a halt to technological development — and there’s no guarantee that the brakes will work. There’s no possible future other than loss of control or stagnation.
"One of the reasons that predictions about the death of the library, office, workplace, book, etc. in the age of the Internet have not come to pass is that these older institutions or technologies had uses that went beyond the strictly functional ones of information processing, storage, retrieval, etc.. Offices, for example, aren't just places where knowledge workers move zeros and ones around; the good ones are creative spaces that offer workers access to unique stores of informal knowledge. "
"My wondering was rewarded by this excerpt from Spiritual Instruction and Discourses, Vol I: The Authentic Seal by Archimandrite Aimilianos: “Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution”
He argues that there isn’t anything essentially different about today’s technology, in its effect on our spiritual life, than there ever has been. Technology per se is not the problem. Rather it is the “absence of accountability in the way in which technology is administered and exploited.” "
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