Notes on 'The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World'
scattered-thoughts.net
scattered-thoughts.net
The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish Deep Work).
Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?
One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler of Deep Work)
Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.
- the constraints of the tool itself - the culture of the organization that uses the tool
One organization could use emails and issue trackers completely asynchronously with scheduled twice daily checkins.
Yet another could use them for near instantaneous communication.
As always, the technology is usually something that simply exposes the underlying human behaviors.
The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop).
Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare).
Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome.
Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-outcome.
A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.
radio 38y
telephone 20y
tv 13y
cellphone 12y
internet 4y
ipod 3y
myspace 2.5y
facebook 2y
youtube 1y
angry birds 35dI'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.
It would be like taking TV and baselining it's growth off of when second NTSC standard took effect.
If television hit 100 million viewers, but only had one channel... And I create a second television channel, I'd hit 50 million viewers overnight.
Yet, I did not create anything quantifiably different.
People uploaded and shared videos before Youtube was a thing, and used social networks (forums) before Facebook or Myspace were a thing. People played mobile games before Angry Birds. The problem was that the other solutions weren't as good.
1. tv, radio: passive adoption, buy them and turn them on. the end user consumes cheaply and effortlessly, with minimal barriers to adoption.
2. telephone, cellphone: one habituates and bootstraps the other. this technology's adoption rate is the only meaningful pair of members on the list, due to the premise of the network effect of peering with fellow users. cellphones are a redundancy, with really only service provider adoption and promotion factoring into the rate of expansion. users are throttled by carrier capacity and tower coverage, not unlike copper plant expansion with land lines.
3. ipod: most egregious example of cherry-picking. flouts predecessor technologies. what about mini-disc players? what about the diamond rio MP3 players? compact discs, audio cassetes, 8 tracks all affect the demand curve of the ipod, and yet such statistics are selectively ignored. why? because they aren't useful accomplices to the desired narrative.
4. internet: facilitates several other members on the list, for which adoption becomes implicit, based on habituation to the internet. piggy-backed on existing infrastructure, adoption is partly behavioral, in that once the transmission protocols are established, adoption is very nearly reduced to buying a device, plugging into phone or tv infrastructure, and typing instead of talking. one could reduce consumer participation down to the level of TTY advances, since much of the rest is virtual and software oriented.
5. facebook, myspace, youtube: nigh-indistinguishable examples. very nearly non-examples.
web sites:internet::tv shows:television.
6. angry birds: a non-event, with regard to tech adoption. what about nintendo, and why not other specific examples of video games? did we chart the adoption of "Altered Beast" or "Doom" or "Mike Tyson's Punch Out"? some of those likely matched "Angry Birds" in a single christmas season. Content does not represent new technology by default. Angry Birds is not a novel technology for it's platform. It is a media template that has existed since before QBASIC GORILLAS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
In this respect, Angry Birds represents technology that had ALREADY BEEN ADOPTED DECADES EARLIER BY MILLIONS. It does not belong on the list any more than Cousin Larry and Balki Bartokomous belong on the list due to the rapid adoption rate of the "technology" known as "Perfect Strangers" in 1986.
That list is a joke, and threatens the credibility of the entire article.