Unlike some of the people I know who share my intense concern about the future of our planet, I'm not particularly opposed to technology. In fact, I've been known to raise the ire of an ecologist or two with my suggestion that we can actually use technology to understand why it is that contact with nature is so important to our health, well-being, and sanity. I think we can. In fact, I will be so bold as to say that in my laboratory, I think we have all the tools and brainpower we need to arrive at some preliminary answers to that question in the next few years.
In spite of my being soft on screens, microprocessors, and nice wide bandwidths of bits being pumped into my house and office at screaming speeds, I can't help sometimes thinking about the impact on my life, especially my working life, of having a big hose filled with information that is, literally, never out of my hand's reach at any time of the day or night. Most of the time, I think this is a positive impact. Because I know that any lapse in memory can be quickly patched up by a Google search, I can relax about what's in the knowledge bank and worry more about making the connections between things that I think constitute the real power of intelligence (on the other hand, I sometimes worry, especially late at night, that my mind is now IN the Internet or at least exists in some kind of bio-silicon hybrid form).
A bigger concern for me, though, is what's happening right now as I write these words. I'm also, from time to time, peering over at another screen which displays my email. Occasionally, I feel a small buzz at my hip which is a vibrating alert on my phone indicating that one or more of my children is reporting in on their whereabouts. When I'm working on something dull, or something difficult, or one of those tasks for which I seem to have a daily threshold (I can only grade five papers per day -- after that my judgement wanders), I take frequent breaks to look around at other items on my screens. My email program is set to harvest new messages at 20 minute intervals. I can sometimes tell whether I'm utterly absorbed in a task when the full 20 minutes elapses and is not co-opted by a manual send/receive command shooting out of my finger.
In a way that never used to be true, my attention is distributed. Though I can remember being so absorbed in a problem, a piece of computer programming, or a book to such an extent that I would look up and notice that it was 4 am and I hadn't eaten supper, I can now no longer remember the last time this happened. Now there are just too many different inputs vying for my attention and it has become my normal mode of existence to shuffle my mind around from one thing to another on a fairly regular and frequent basis. Some might say that I've evolved, but I'm pretty sure I've lost something as well.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be an examiner on a dissertation that included a clever set of studies on something called the "attentional bottleneck." It can be very complicated, but the basic idea is that human attention is narrowly focused in a way that allows us to only actually attend to a small amount of information at one time. The attentional bottleneck is why it is not a good idea to talk on a cellphone while driving, for example. I remember commenting to the student that what I found most remarkable about this processing bottleneck was that everything we know about how brains work suggest that they're massive parallel processors -- they can do lots of things at the same time. Given this, it seems strange that there is this fundamental limit on how much of these wondrous goings-on we can pay attention to -- very little it seems.
Why does that bottleneck exist and what does it mean to us that we live in a rich informational environment that provides us with constant encouragement to try to widen it? I think that without the bottleneck, we'd have an entirely different way of experiencing the world. For one thing, it would be more difficult for us to figure out the temporal order in which things happened to us, so hard to put together the story of our lives.
I wonder -- is our understanding of time worse now than before we allowed ourselves to be immersed in data soup?
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Posted by: dissertation help | December 01, 2008 at 01:18 AM