Digital Overload

Submitted by roy on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 23:42.

A few days ago I read an interview on Wired magazine's website. The topic was "digital overload", and the person being interviewed was Maggie Jackson. In the interview, Jackson says that paying attention isn't a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots. These roots are being destroyed by all of the electronic devices that we now are tethered to, along with their applications.

The Wired writer eloquently states "In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. "The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us," said Jackson. "But at the same time, that doesn't mean that nothing has changed. The question is, how do we confront our own challenges?"

When I interviewed Dan Markovitz on Lean practices in the workplace, the dominant theme of the interview was interruptions. We are being inundated by interruptions at work and at home. If you have kids, watch what they do each time they get a text message on their cell phone. Hopefully you're not speaking with them when the text comes in, because if you are, you can scratch that conversation. You have just lost them to the interruption of the text message. And the younger generation is as hooked on text messages as many other generations have been hooked on drugs.

Jackson's book predicts a "coming dark age" due to this. Jackson says "dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering"

You can read the entire Jackson interview here.

roy's blog
Login or register to post comments

Wishing All A Great Year!

Submitted by DaneikCorp on Tue, 04/28/2009 - 17:43.

Keith Tully

Email: keith@amazingleadership.com

In the month of May 2009, I will be taking over as administrator for Amazing Leadership, and I wanted to extend a big THANK YOU for being a part of Roy's initial vision, and I encourage you all to stay on with me and increase the membership of this website!

A FEW UPCOMING CHANGES

In the last few months, I have begun speaking with several people about getting more content and vision into this forum. I will be pushing for a few things in the next year to come:

For one thing, you will see more intellectual property for sale that can benefit your life and/or business. It will become a place for the sale of methodology workbooks, interviews, and all kinds of leadership materials developed by a team of individuals looking to benefit our members directly.

You will also see a change in membership. We will still have the free memberships, but there will also be a paid membership option that will deliver access to different parts of the site, one-on-one conversations with the leaders behind the scenes, more materials, and discounts on our business services.

Finally, you will see a development of business and leadership services at a fair price that will take the form of keynote speakers on topics of interest, on-site leadership development teams, and conference call appointments with professionals who will dedicate their time to creating a solution to any challenge you or your company may be facing.

VISION

We will be changing the site to offer the most benefit to our clients as we possibly can!

If you want to read more leadership material we will have it for free and for sale; if you want to put out your articles and opinions to the world, you will have forum space to deliver your thoughts; and if you are looking for help with a particular challenge, we will offer solutions and advice for you! Additionally, if you need a trained professional to walk you or your team through an service or product that you would lke to develop, then we will have a solution for that as well!

I hope to see our membership greatly increase over the next few months and I hope that you all will not hesitate to contribute your thoughts on a regular basis as well! This site should be a great forum for thought and action on leadership principles, theories, and activities! Please treat it as a HOME for all your LEADERSHIP questions, answers, and comments! I greatly encourage you to participate and create the kind of site you are really looking for -- I will take all suggestions into consideration and try to make this the one place you can really feel as though someone is listening when you talk about leadership issues.

*GREAT OFFER -- PAID MEMBERSHIPS FOR FREE*

I challenge you to take the next few months very seriously. Please make suggestions, offer your experiences, and most of all bring your friends to this site today! Talk to as many people as you can about our website, and how we are going to be changing, and ask your friends to sign up for their free memberships right away because YOU and they will all become paid members for FREE! You will be glad you did because once we begin charging, there will be a difference in the paid versus free memberships as far as access to all the parts of the site and the materials they can find to help them succeed.

Thank you all for being a big part of Amazing Leadership, and I hope that you will enjoy the newsletters and forum into the years to come!

All the best,

Keith