October 25, 2005

meta

Very interesting, long article in NYT on meta-time/work productivity. Touches on multitasking as an "interrupt-driven" lifestyle, a culture of obsessive unruly data collection (music, photos, documents), our ambiguous feelings toward online "connectedness," and being hyper-productive human robots:

Exerpt:

"But for many users, simplicity now trumps power. Linda Stone, the software executive who has worked alongside the C.E.O.'s of both Microsoft and Apple, argues that we have shifted eras in computing. Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay.

"... Some experts argue that the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent bottleneck - forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might have to cease looking like computers ..."

2 comments:

Miss J said...

i have to admit, this article makes me really want to get my triple 23" monitors now ...

Anonymous said...

indeed!

in a class discussion on "duidao" on thursday, "the price is right" was brought up, and fit in perfectly. well, it was more a discussion of the importance of figures, and of the roles of time, and schedules in our lives... rather than meta-time/work productivity...

dammit! i'll just call you soon.. so much dragging of feet in mud..

happy fall-back night!