Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Thomas A. Beckett" <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

        Some of y'all may have read the op/ed piece in the New York Times a
couple weeks ago about the social psychological effects of living in a
wired world.  The catchphrase that seems to have captured the zeigeist
is the concept of "continuous partial attention."  Basically, we are so
pervasively connected to various communication devices that we spread
our attention among several inputs at once and give our concentration to
nothing (and no body).  

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/opinion/30FRIE.html

        I find this happening to me, certainly.  It is in the same category as
channel surfing and web surfing.  Seems like it has been a long time
since I've spent as much as half a day curled up with a good book, or
writing, etc.  

        Does this affect your life?  

TaB

Some excerpts:  

Then there was the panel about the 21st-century corporation, during
which participants described this age of digital Darwinism in chilling
terms: The key to winning in business today is adapt or die, get wired
or
get killed, work 24 hours a day from everywhere or be left behind.
Finally, during the question time, Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony
America, stood up and said: "Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like
a
vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be
time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off."

My favorite, though, was that we now live in an age of what a Microsoft
researcher, Linda Stone, called continuous partial attention. I love
that
phrase. It means that while you are answering your e-mail and talking to
your kid, your cell phone rings and you have a conversation. You are
now involved in a continuous flow of interactions in which you can only
partially concentrate on each.

The problem is that human beings simply are not designed to be like
computer servers. For one thing, they are designed to sleep eight hours
a
night. So there is a big misfit brewing here. I still can't program my
VCR;
how am I going to program my toaster? As Jeff Garten, dean of the Yale
School of Management and author of a smart new book that deals with
some of these themes, "The Mind of the CEO," said: "Maybe it's not time
for us to adapt or die, but for the technology to adapt or die."