…from a power-structure concepts book featured by Grain Edit…
is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
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Christopher Butler
Christopher Butler
“
Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.
The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people…these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
”— Matt Richtel, for the NYTimes
Experience The Walker Library of Human Imagination
“The Walker Library has been described on the cover of Wired magazine as “The most amazing library in the world.” It is certainly a private library unlike any other. Set on three maze-like levels, it showcases a collection of thousands of rare books, artworks, maps and manuscripts as well as museum-quality artifacts both modern and ancient. Both the Library and the collection are dedicated to an overarching theme: The History of Human Imagination — humanity’s intellectual and emotional adventure of discovery, learning, and creativity.
The genesis of the Library occurred in the mid-1990s based on Jay S. Walker’s passion for history, technology and the scope of human invention. After six years of planning and computer modeling, the Library was constructed in 2002.
The Library is itself a considerable work of imagination, beginning with its unique layout and lighting. Multilevel tiers, “floating” platforms, connecting stairways, and glass-paneled bridges were all inspired by the mind-bending art of M. C. Escher, whose architectural drawings seem to defy the laws of space and gravity.” (…) — Source & More facts about Walker Library
Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library:
Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer … is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy. (…)
Wearing a huge can-you-believe-it grin is the collection’s impresario, the 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur and founder of Walker Digital — a think tank churning out ideas and patents, it’s best-known for its lucrative Priceline.com. “I started an R&D lab and have been an entrepreneur. So I have a big affinity for the human imagination,” he says. “About a dozen years ago, my collection got so big that I said, ‘It’s time to build a room, a library, that would be about human imagination. (…)”
Also cool. (via)
Chuck Klosterman, in his essay, “Fail,” (one of several collected in the book, Eating the Dinosaur) wrote:
“We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.”
Is this really true? I tend toward thinking it is, particularly from my vantage point in a technology-driven industry as well as, frankly, my own tendency toward techno-pessimism. In a post from last month, I explored this theme a bit in terms of how we augment our bodies and experience with technology—that there is almost no separation between us and our technology. This quote from Klosterman gets at the same point, but it also brought to mind some trends that I see specifically in the workplace. Much of what we do is enabled by communications technology. In particular, email, instant messaging, shared calendars, project management applications, social media tools and the like enable a team to quickly mobilize and complete projects even if the resources are spread out geographically. This is the modern, web-working paradigm. While most of these tools have been a revelation as functional enablers of otherwise dysfunctional team setups, efficiency and cost savings, I wonder if they are always the most effective thing available to us. Actually, I’m willing to just come out and say that at least sometimes they’re not.
The iPad is a device for 3rd spaces--a device for the city.
Totally agreed on this peripheral point, too:
Even better would be to ditch the shelf metaphor altogether in favour of something more appropriate for digital content; something more innate to the medium.
This is a wonderful PBS documentary on the digital life. It’s given me a lot to think about.
“Gadgets have swept the world before, but mobile computing devices are different. Through applications and upgrades, they can acquire new powers. Apple alone offers more than 100,000 apps and has delivered more than 2 billion downloads. Phones are becoming maps, TVs, libraries, shopping tools, video cameras, car keys, and credit cards.
In more and more places, machines are running the world. On stock exchanges, high-speed computers armed with trading algorithms and superior pattern recognition are thrashing human competitors. Airline autopilots have become so reliable that human pilots can check out. In cars, software is beginning to assume responsibility for steering, braking, and parking. Drones are patrolling our borders, catching humans who try to sneak in. Computers are telling child-welfare agencies whether to take kids away from parents. Programs are running “virtual call centers,” measuring the output of dispersed salespeople and routing customer phone calls to the best performers. Computers don’t just work for us anymore. We work for them.”
— William Saletan on Which is More Important, Politics or Technology?
The iPad better watch its back. According to an article on Motherboard, a U.K.-based company has developed the portable computer for the future: a laptop without a screen.
10 Proposals for Fixing the E-Mail Glut
One of the good ideas:
Real-time services like Twitter and FriendFeed illustrate the potential usefulness of a streaming interface. I don’t have to see all the tweets in my stream; if something is specifically important it will be re-tweeted by people in my network. The more this happens, the better the chance that I will eventually see it. What if we made e-mail into a stream? If a message is important, people can re-mail it, and it then moves back to the top of the list.
From Russell Davies. So true. I rarely buy things that are not food from stores.
“Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customization?”
“Telling an internal social media marketing specialist to “be human” might come from the marketing department, but only a company that has been engineered from the ground up to support a culture of human business has the ability to empower that employee to actually be human.”
—
Tom Webster, in his post, “What’s Wrong With Social Media Strategy”
He continues here, in what I think takes some courage to say:
I don’t think anyone “gets it” (myself included) because we don’t know where this is going. Telling a marketing department to be “helpful and human” on the social web is a tactical message. Reengineering the company so that its employees can actually be helpful and human may require an enormous overhaul of the very theory of the firm.
“My take is that cloud computing, for all of its apparent (and supposed) benefits, stands to lose legitimacy and support (financial and otherwise) when the first big, millions-of-people-affecting, failure hits. Companies that tie themselves too closely to this particular model, as either service providers or customers, could be in real trouble.”
—
Jamais Cascio says “I Told You So!” In a recent column on the failure of Microsoft’s Danger Sidekick, he quotes his own words from back in January (above) on the vulnerability of cloud computing.
I like this part:
But the point of resilience models is that failure happens.
Exactly, which is why I love the phrase, “Try to Visualize Catastrophe.”
