Jun 16 2009
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Psychological vs. Physical, Spam, 6.16.09
Feb 07 2009
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111. Is There a Cure for the 'Distraction Virus'?
May 22, 2008
By Mike Elgan
We all want to succeed in our careers. We go to school for at least 16 years. We study late at night to pass exams and get certifications. We take on-the-job training, and try to teach ourselves new skills. We attend industry conferences to build our knowledge and cultivate peer contacts. We read productivity books and blogs, and try to get more work done in less time. We work nights sometimes, and weekends. Success is important to us.
And then along comes YouTube, the agent of our destruction. And FaceBook. And BoingBoing. And Slashdot. And Digg. And Fark, the Drudge Report, Neatorama, Apple’s Movie Trailers page, eBay, Flickr — (I get paid by the word, so I’ll just keep going) — Break.com, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon.com. Google, for crying out loud. (This is a reputable web site, so I won’t mention porn, online poker and extreme-video sites.)
Whenever we’ve got something boring, unappealing or difficult to do, we know that passive, easy, fun, interesting and compelling content is just a click away.
The Internet is an incredible productivity tool that offers unprecedented access to information and communication with others. But it’s also distracting. Really distracting. More alarmingly, it’s getting increasingly distracting every day.
In a recent blog post, essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham offered the profound insight that Internet-based distraction “is not a static obstacle that you avoid like you might avoid a rock in the road. Distraction seeks you out.” And “as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.”
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He also points out that distraction and work look and sometimes even feel the same. You’ve been at your computer for six hours straight. How much of that was productive work, and how much amusement? It’s hard to say, accurately. If Internet-based distractions threaten our ability to get our work done and succeed in our careers, if they seek us out, and if they evolve like viruses to become more compelling and addictive, what does that mean?
Here’s what it means:
1. We’re not “preparing kids for the future.” There is a strong push worldwide to “prepare kids for the future” by installing Internet-connected PCs in schools. Part of this effort is to bridge the “digital divide” between rich and poor. But maybe growing up without video games and a PC in your room is an advantage. Maybe the “have nots” will be better equipped than the “haves” to face the distraction super-virus of the future because they won’t become addicted as children to the Internet-distraction impulse.
I have an Indian friend -– an overachieving genius type -– who graduated at the top of his class at IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) and for the last decade has been launching startups in Silicon Valley. He now has two young kids of his own, who he hopes will follow in his footsteps. When he was growing up in Bangalore in the ’70s and ’80s, he had no Internet distractions and nothing all that compelling on TV or on the radio. Teens didn’t have their own cars, or shopping malls to hang out at. All his cultural influences were teachers, parents and grandparents (some of whom with Ph.Ds), and fellow private-school, over-achieving classmates. The most entertaining thing in his life was math homework.
Related ArticlesHis kids will grow up in another world, one with Xbox 3,060 (complete with virtual reality helmet), 5,000 channels on TV, friends video-texting their holographic cell phones in the middle of the night – and inconceivably addictive distractions online. What will it take for his kids to succeed the way he did? Will they even want to? And who had the better “preparation for the future”?
2. Training needs to include distraction coping mechanisms. Company training programs teach applications, and sometimes even productivity. But maybe it’s time to institute training programs that explicitly help people cope with online distractions.
3. Productivity means nothing if time gained is squandered. Wonderful productivity blogs like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Web Worker Daily, Get Rich Slowly, Zen Habits and others serve to transmit productivity ideas to those who care. But what good is productivity if time saved ends up being squandered on pointless distractions? For every five minutes we save on some new productivity technique, we need to figure out how to spend that five minutes productively or meaningfully or we’ve gained nothing.
4. We need to evolve our personal methods for coping with distraction, or the distractions win. Think of how distracting the Internet was 15 years ago -– in 1993 -– compared to now. (The answer: Not very.) Now try to imagine how distracting it will be 15 years from now. Each new Web 2.0 site, social network and video streaming site represents another assault on our ability to focus on productive work. How compelling, addictive and distracting will the Web 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 be? The techniques you succeed with today may not be good enough for tomorrow. We need to evolve constantly.
5. The individual, the company, the nation that is best at avoiding distractions in the future will have an enormous advantage in the competitive marketplace. Think about the obesity problem. A century ago, America had the world’s healthiest population, tallest people and best food. Fast forward to today. The quality of food has declined as the quantity has increased. Now 60 percent of Americans are overweight, and a quarter clinically obese. And low-quality food is also making us shorter. What happened?
The marketing of food -– advertising, packaging, brand development -– evolved like a virus. Our food-industrial complex learned to seduce us into radical over-consumption. This evolution outpaced our defenses against it. Kids are addicted to sugar, artificial flavors and junk-food brands before they’re even old enough to ride a bike. Adults compulsively consume packaged, processed foods despite daily warnings in the news about their ill effects. The junk food virus is literally killing us.
Is this where Internet distractions are taking us? Is there an intellectual or mental “obesity epidemic” on the horizon? Are we there already?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’ve got a bad feeling that the evolving online distraction virus is an underappreciated threat that nobody is really dealing with
Is there a cure? Probably not. But the first step -– as with any addiction -– is to recognized that we’ve got a problem.
Tags: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Internet, YouTubehttp://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/article.php/11079_3748656_1/Is-There-a-Cure-for-the-Distraction-Virus.htm
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110. Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control
Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control
By Mike Elgan
December 29, 2008
The industrial revolution didn’t arise out of nowhere, and it didn’t arise everywhere. It was made possible by the emergence of a set of personal values that came to be known as the “work ethic.”
The idea behind this meme — inconceivable 400 years ago — is that hard work is good for its own sake. Hard work makes you a better person. With hard work, our parents told us, we could grow up to become anything. Work hard, and we could get good grades, elite-school acceptance and scholarships. We could invent things, launch businesses and change the world. “Genius,” Thomas Edison told us, “is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
This industrial-age work ethic has its variants, including the “Protestant work ethic,” the “American work ethic,” and the “Asian work ethic” to name a few. The success or failure of regions, nations and subcultures has been massively influenced by the degree to which populations embrace the value of hard work. And that’s why the idea is hammered into kids in school, and lauded and rewarded in the workplace.
When the “information age” started replacing the “industrial age,” hard work seemed more important than ever. Until the 1980s, to use a computer was to program it. Silicon Valley corporate culture, from tiny startups to the massive Googleplex, emphasizes long hours and feverish work.
But since the turn of the new millennium, the nature of work has evolved to the point where hard work is becoming less important to a successful work ethic than another, more useful value: attention.
The New Work Ethic
Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate: “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.”
But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more “distracting” all the time — like a virus. Distractions now “seek you out.”
Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?
Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be “following” these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?
The need for “attention,” rather than “hard work,” as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we’ve gone from a total separation of “work” from “non-work” to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.
Now, we find ourselves with absolutely nothing standing between us and a universe of distractions — nothing except our own abilities to control attention. Porn, gambling, funny videos, flirting, socializing, playing games, shopping — it’s all literally one click away. Making matters worse, indulging these distractions looks just like work. And it’s easy to work and play at the same time — and call it work. These new, increasingly compelling distractions get piled on to older ones — office pop-ins, e-mail, IM, text messages, meetings and others.
Kids now grow up with the whole range of distractions, from big-screen TVs to video games to cell phones to PCs in their rooms. They’re addicted to screens before they even start high school. Their attention spans have been whittled down to seconds, and their expectations for constant amusement are highly developed.
In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention?
A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s “multi-tasking” all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.
It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.
Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?
In addition to writing for Datamation, where this column first appeared, Mike Elgan is a technology writer and former editor of Windows magazine. He can be reached at mike.elgan+datamation@gmail.com or his blog: http://therawfeed.com.
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109. Energy vampire - Wikipedia
For electrical devices that consume energy on standby mode, see Standby power.An energy vampire or psychic vampire is a mythical being said to have the ability to feed off the “life force” (often also called qi, prana, energy or vitality) of other living creatures. Alternative terms for these persons are pranic vampire, empathic vampire, energy predator (see below), psy/psi-vamp, energy parasite, energivore or psionic vampire.
Use in the 20th and 21st century
Dion Fortune wrote of psychic parasitism in relation to vampirism as early as 1930 (considering it a combination of psychic and psychological pathology) in “Psychic Self-Defense”. The term “psychic vampire” first gained attention in the 1960s with the publication of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible. LaVey, who claimed to have coined the term, used it to mean a spiritually or emotionally weak person who drains vital energy from other people. Adam Parfrey likewise attributed the term to LaVey in an introduction to The Devil’s Notebook.
The term is also used by Luis Marques in his work on vampirism and spirituality, entitled the Asetian Bible, where the definition of a psychic vampire goes beyond his ability to drain energy, but is portrayed as a definitive condition of the individual’s soul and a secret mark of a connection to a shared past. This polemic view of the energy predator is based on an esoteric tradition known as Asetianism, which relies on predatory spirituality and the extensive use of Ancient Egyptian symbolism, whose teachings are strictly and thoroughly maintained by the occultist Order of Aset Ka.
The theme of the psychic vampire has been a focus within modern Vampire subculture. The way that the subculture has manipulated the image of the psychic vampire has been investigated by researchers such as Mark Benecke, and A. Asbjorn Jon.Jon has noted that, like the traditional psychic vampires, those of Vampyre subculture ‘prey upon life-force or ‘pranic’ energy’. Jon also noted that the group has been loosely linked to the Goth subculture.
[edit] See also
2.6.09
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108. Speed Dating for Smiths Fans
Trust me, it only gets worse…
Today I am happy to have guest-writer Jon contribute a fascinating and humorous tale from his personal life that will please any fan of my “Adventures In Dating” stories. In a phone conversation Thursday afternoon, Jon told me that his plans for that evening included the possibility of attending something called “Speed Dating For Smiths Fans.” Without hesitation, I told him that he had to go — not because I am interested in seeing a friend find a romantic link, but because I wanted him to write about the experience. It’s times like these I regret moving across the country to Los Angeles. Could you imagine the damage I might carry out at such an event were it held in closer proximity to where I live? I am heavily considering creating a “Speed Dating For LOST Fans” event in LA. I have no interest in finding a date, but maybe it’d help Nate finally bang out with a hot girl he could also talk at about his LOST theories.
To my surprise, Jon responded positively to my request for him to write about “Speed Dating For Smiths Fans,” and here is his account of what transpired the other night. Please enjoy, and thank you Jon for being such a good friend and contributing to Swan Fungus. You’ve now earned carte blanche (like Ian and Sam) to submit any piece of writing you want to the website (note: that doesn’t mean I will post it. I am a cruel, dictatorial blog owner). Also, I’ve included some bracketed editorial comments, mostly to make fun of Jon and Smiths fans.
Speed Dating For Smiths Fans
by Jon
What do you get when you mix The Smiths and speed dating? Hopefully a good blog post. But if you’re looking for love, you may have to Stretch Out And Wait. Could anything more be expected when the thing that has brought you together is The Pope of Mope? I, guest blogger Jon, am here to come clean. For those of you that are stoned and haven’t yet processed anything I’ve written beyond “What do you get…” yes, I attended a Smiths-themed speed dating event in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Never in a million years could I see myself speed dating, but when I read on Gothamist about Smiths speed dating, I told myself I had to go. Then again, if I saw an ad for The Smiths Anal Rape Night, I’d probably attend that too. In case you can’t tell, I really like The Smiths… as in my favorite band is The Smiths. Don’t be so quick to judge the quality of my musical taste, I can give Evan a run for his (lack of) money when it comes to music knowledge, so its not like I haven’t been exposed to good music. The Smiths are just The Bees Knees.
Subconsciously, I think I went to the speed dating event to validate my love of The Smiths. I mean, seriously, who can say they attended a fucking Smiths speed dating night? I don’t even think Morrissey can claim as much. That’s right, I just implied that I have more Smiths cred than Morrissey. Right now, only about sixty-plus people (and those who were turned away at the door) can make such a claim. Yes, so many people showed up they had to turn people away. Continuing with the psychoanalysis, I also think I went to the event to piss off my friend Ian. He hates the fact that an “All he does is play goddamn arpeggios” guitarist like Johnny Marr could be so revered. Ian also hates that his supposed BFF, who supposedly has good taste in music, could be brainwashed into believing the hype surrounding The Smiths [There’s “hype” surrounding The Smiths? I thought their fans were a small pocket of misanthropic shut-ins and homos!—Ed.]. Finally, I’m sure some part of me went because it would actually be really nice to finally meet someone with similar interests. I have yet to date a girl for more than a couple of months who knew who the Smiths were! I once dated a girl who said she knew who they were, only to discover a month later (after I pulled out a Smiths record) she had no idea who they were! She then said she thought my favorite band was The Sniffs! I knew right then and there that she and I could only date for two-and-a-half more months. On a serious note, I recently broke up with a really great girl primarily for this reason…our interests were too dis-similar. When I have found someone who fits the bill, they tend to live on the other side of the country, if that close. Shortly after breaking up with that girl, I met a cool girl who was in a rock band, liked some of the same bands I liked…Did any of that matter? Nope! She lives in France. By now you can maybe see why I like The Smiths so much.
Speed Dating For Smiths Fans took place at this small bar in Greenpoint. The host was Dave Hill, who my improv-loving friend tells me is a “big deal,” but who I wouldn’t be able to recognize in a lineup of Native American women. I was in a bit of a stupor when I first walked in, having just gone record shopping and having been disconnected from Evan while trying to buy some more records through him. Damn those unsteady phone signals. As soon as I walked into the bar, they handed me a sticker with a number and a sheet with Morrissey’s picture. So far, so awkward. Less than half of the crowd came alone, so we were mostly just sitting around being awkward pretending to look cool by playing with our iPhones. At a time when the presence of everyone in the room was a public admittance that we were desperate enough to attend a Smiths-related dating event, the organizers devised a plan to calm our uneasiness. How, you ask? Well, if you guessed “A film crew from Time Out New York” to capture us at our most vulnerable and humiliate us on a much (who am I kidding, sightly) larger scale, you would be correct! Thank God the owners of Time Out are trying to sell that piece of shit; it can’t turn a dime, and the hipster douches who were filming us will soon have nothing more than the interest on their trust funds to fuel their addictions. Before the “dating” started I heard the two Time Out people talking amongst themselves in a condescending tone, wondering why all of these people were on their phones and not mingling. What should we have been talking about, oh wise dating sages? The 21-year-old with the goatee and the size negative 4 jeans standing in the corner? Congratulations, cameraman. You’re at a Smiths speed date. In a sea of Greenpoint hipsters you’ve managed to ascend to the apex of hipsterdom and earn the prize for biggest douche of them all.
It should be noted, before I continue, that the guy who lead the event (I don’t think it was Dave Hill) was really cool and did a great job ensuring the evening went smoothly. He was expecting only twenty people, and instead the place was overflowing [with under-sexed or possibly asexual, overly-emotional nerds?—Ed.]. He didn’t even charge a fee to participate. All in all, kudos to him. I wanted him to be my friend almost as much as I wanted a girl to like me. I guess I should also mention the name of the bar, since they were kind enough to host this for free. it is called the Black Rabbit on Greenpoint Ave.
Now on to the actual “dating”. We were told to pair up at the tables and benches, and at the end of each Smiths or Morrissey song, the guys would rotate. Everything was optional though, no one was overseeing anything. In other words, if what would be considered the normal rotation was going to leave me with a Girl That Was Bigger Than Others, I could just move to another part of the room without making a scene. Don’t worry though, I’m not that shallow. I stuck to the normal rotation and spoke to all-comers. As for the girls, you’d think it would be a pretty reasonable assumption that everyone there likes the Smiths, right? More girls than not had at best a passing interest in the band. I only met one girl who actually tried to get tickets to Morrissey’s upcoming New York City shows. What the fuck?! Every girl I met said the same thing: “I’ve never speed dated, never thought I would, but when I saw this I thought I’d give it a shot.” What made this speed date different from any other speed date? The Smiths? If you take them away, its regular old speed dating! I understand that even if you don’t like the Smiths, you may like the type of guy that likes the Smiths, but come on! If they had Desperate Housewives speed dating — even though I’m sure the girls would be really attractive, and one or two might even possess a soul — there’s no way in hell I’m going to that if for no other reason than out of respect for the girls who came to meet people with similar interests. There was one girl at Smiths Speed Dating who didn’t even know who Morrissey was until early that afternoon! They should have put giant headphones on her, sat her in the corner facing the wall, and made her listen to The Queen is Dead on repeat until she was talking with a British accent and ripping her shirt off and throwing it to her adoring fans. Er…I mean speed daters.
I walked in with no expectations. I was there more for the story than the encounters [sure you were Jon, sure you were…—Ed.] but fortunately a couple of the girls were actually pretty cool. I think I really hit it off with a girl who I would probably never meet in any other situation, because its not every day that I befriend full-blown anarchists. Seriously, she was an I-make-a-living-by-publishing-anarchist-materials anarchist! She was — perhaps surprisingly — really down to earth and intelligent. The only problem was that she seemed pretty tough. Maybe that’s just my anarchist bias talking, but that was the impression she gave me. Like, if I ever met her in a dark alley, one of us would be getting their face bashed in, and you can probably guess who that would be. That’s right…her. There’s no way I’d let a girl kick my ass. Still, she’d probably put up a good fight.
The crown jewel of the night, though, was a girl that had a role in a movie I saw recently. I distinctly remember thinking to myself during the movie that the girl was beautiful. I also distinctly remember thinking to myself during our brief encounter that the girl was beautiful. Lest you think my attraction to women is purely physical [you mean there’s more to women than looks?—Ed.], she also had a great personality! Or so I think, since I only had William It Was Really Nothing to get to know her. She was sarcastic, outgoing, and seemed to be just plain fun. She made fun of me for never having seen High Fidelity [you’re not missing much, Jon, just one of a cheesy romantic comedy that gives record store employees a bad name!—Ed.]. The rules of Smiths Speed Dating stipulated that we were supposed to get the e-mail addresses of the girls that liked us, but I just scribbled mine down and it’s probably illegible so I may have simple find this girl on Facebook. Who knows, maybe Smiths speed dating will Let Me Get What I Want This Time. There was one other girl that had a Shyness That Was Criminally Vulgar (understandably so) but gave me the sense that if she was in a more comfortable setting she could be fun. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for her, it turns out we’re both taking the same sketch writing class at UCB in March. Maybe for my first writing assignment I’ll submit this article and show her that I thought she was quiet and dull but full of potential.
So for all of you out there who, like me, dreamed of meeting your soul mate via the Smiths, hopefully you now know what you’re in for, should a Smiths Speed Dating night suddenly pop up in your town or city. For any girls in the New York area who reading this, if you knew who Morrissey was before Thursday give Evan your contact info and he’ll pass it along to me. Eh, What Difference Does It Make? No, seriously, get in touch! Serious. [Seriously girls, he needs it—Ed.]
Oh, and for those among us who can’t quote virtually ever Smiths lyric like I can, a lot of the random capitalized/italicized phrases are Smiths lyrics.
2.6.09, via Chris, G-Chat
http://www.swanfungus.com/2009/01/speed-dating-for-smiths-fans.html
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108. SolidAlliance Aura Monitor
I’m not too sure what this Aura Monitor from SolidAlliance does, but apparently it is a ball-shaped device that can be hooked up to your cellphone or other personal belongings while changing its color according to your current aura. I suppose this works in the same manner as a mood ring, albeit on a geekier level. No idea on how much it costs nor when will the Aura Monitor be available, but I won’t pay too much attention to its color when worn on somebody else as it is most probably hogwash. In fact, it looks a lot like a Pokeball. Are there any believers out there?
2.6.09, http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/04/solidalliance_aura_monitor.html
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107. “Gossip Girl Animal Collective mash-up.”
2.6.09, via Kate, Google Share
http://23.media.tumblr.com/CdB6eSjcdiytco5deKDQBPLeo1_400.jpg
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