The Age of Distraction: Your Brain on Technology

Here's the issue: It goes back to when Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 — that's less than a decade ago. Fifty-eight percent of American adults have a smartphone today. Sixty-seven percent of the time, people are looking at their phones without any sort of ring or vibration. Forty-four percent of Americans have slept with their phone next to their beds. ...many of you told us smartphones make you feel like you have the power to be connected all the time, organized beyond measure, and never, ever without entertainment while you're waiting for coffee. But you've also told us they make you feel dependent, exhausted, and addicted — some of you say you're actually relieved when you lose or break your phones for a day.
~Manoush Zomorodi, "The Case for Boredom"

We recently took part in the podcast Note to Self's Bored and Brilliant project, a week of challenges aimed at helping people detach from their phones and spend more time thinking creatively. The challenges included not taking any pictures for a day and deleting the app you use most (at least for a day), and you are also supposed to download an app that monitors your phone use (it seems counterintuitive to add an app to your phone to stop you from using the apps on your phone, but the results were, in our case, somewhat alarming).  This got us thinking about our technology usage - how much we used technology, what kinds of technology, and what for.

There are several item in the catalog that speak to our modern use of technology, whether it's about staying connected without diminishing our intelligence, attention spans, and ability to really live; the legal contract social media users have made with service providers; the lack of opportunities for silence, wonder, and solitude in our hyperconnected lives; the affect of our increasingly networked world on global affairs; young people's use of social media; and a couple even posit that every technological innovation - from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today, but we adapt. If you're uneasy about your use of technology or looking to find out more about the ways technology connects us all, the library catalog might have something to pique your interest!  Here are some likely contenders:

The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd

Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives by Randi Zuckerberg

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better by Clive Thompson

Digital Distractions: How To Stay Safe, Healthy and Sane [DVD]  

Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live, and Communicate by Shawn DuBravac, Ph. D. 

How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson  [DVD]

Links

Feeling Overconnected? 5 Reasons to Unplug From Technology After Work [Forbes]

8 Ways to Disconnect From Technology and Get More Done! [HuffPost]

Technology: Can You Disconnect From the 'Matrix'? [Psychology Today]

'You've Been On Your Phone for 160 Minutes Today' [Mashable]

Science & Technology Staff Picks

Library staff don't just check out books to you - we read them, too! Many branches have staff pick displays which you can browse. Here are some staff picks in science, social science, and technology from various staff members.  Would you like to see more staff picks in different categories on abcreads?  Let us know in the comments! Also, make sure you check out our Best of 2014 Staff Picks and our Staff Picks in the catalog.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin 

From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos. What is time? This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face--from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles--come down to the nature of time. The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to today's quantum theorists, have seen things differently. The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable. That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary. Lee Smolin, author of the controversial bestseller The Trouble with Physics, argues that a limited notion of time is holding physics back. It's time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics. What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilities. There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with huge implications for physics and beyond--from climate change to the economic crisis. Smolin explains in lively and lucid prose how the true nature of time impacts our world.  Staff review: Lee Smolin is the guy to turn to for arguments that time is not an illusion, and that physics is stuck because we don't understand it.  

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle Over General Relativity 

by Pedro G. Ferreira

At the core of Einstein's general theory of relativity are a set of equations that explain the relationship among gravity, space, and time--possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern physics. For over a century, physicists have been exploring, debating, and at times neglecting Einstein's theory in their quest to uncover the history of the universe, the origin of time, and the evolution of solar systems, stars, and galaxies. In this sweeping narrative of science and culture, Pedro Ferreira explains the theory through the human drama surrounding it: the personal feuds and intellectual battles of the biggest names in twentieth-century physics, from Einstein and Eddington to Hawking and Penrose. We are in the midst of a momentous transformation in modern physics. As scientists look farther and more clearly into space than ever before, The Perfect Theory engagingly reveals the greater relevance of general relativity, showing us where it started, where it has led, and where it can still take us.  Staff review: A great book about the history of General Relativity, full of new insights about the theory as well as the people.  

The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorn 

Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie's jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science. Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself. In chapters on wormholes, black holes, interstellar travel, and much more, Thorne's scientific insights many of them triggered during the actual scripting and shooting of Interstellar, describe the physical laws that govern our universe and the truly astounding phenomena that those laws make possible.  Staff review: Kip Thorne was the science consultant for the movie, and he's also one of the top experts on relativity and worm-holes.  It's lot's of fun, and well grounded and speculative, with great pictures.

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow 

The best-selling author of The Drunkard's Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us an examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events. Your preference in politicians, the amount you tip your waiter, all judgments and perceptions reflect the workings of our mind on two levels: the conscious, of which we are aware, and the unconscious, which is hidden from us. The latter has long been the subject of speculation, but over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the hidden, or subliminal, workings of the mind. The result of this explosion of research is a new science of the unconscious and a sea change in our understanding of how the subliminal mind affects the way we live. Employing accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, the author takes us on a tour of this research, unraveling the complexities of the subliminal self and increasing our understanding of how the human mind works and how we interact with friends, strangers, spouses, and coworkers. In the process he changes our view of ourselves and the world around us. 

Staff review: Spooky! 

Going Viral by Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley  

We live in a world where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours, and where an unknown man or woman can become an international celebrity overnight. Virality: individuals create it, governments fear it, companies would die for it. So what is virality and how does it work? Why does one particular video get millions of views while hundreds of thousands of others get only a handful? In Going Viral, Nahon and Hemsley uncover the factors that make things go viral online. They analyze the characteristics of networks that shape virality, including the crucial role of gatekeepers who control the flow of information and connect networks to one another. They also explore the role of human attention, showing how phenomena like word of mouth, bandwagon effects, homophily and interest networks help to explain the patterns of individual behavior that make viral events. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the Joseph Kony video to the tweet that spread the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead, from the video of Homer Simpson voting in the US elections to the photo of a police officer pepper-spraying students at the University of California Davis, this path-breaking account of viral events will be essential reading for students, scholars, politicians, policymakers, executives, artists, musicians and anyone who wants to understand how our world today is being shaped by the flow of information online.

 Staff review: A fascinating and timely study.

*book description is provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted

Online Privacy

Last week, an essay by young adult author Kathleen Hale was published in The Guardian, detailing a time when Hale stalked a woman who had posted a negative review of Hale's book on Goodreads. Since then, there has been much discussion online about what this means for book bloggers and privacy, so I thought I'd share some useful tips I've found about online privacy.

But first, let's talk about why it's important.

As evidenced by Kathleen Hale's situation, people can find out a lot about other people online. Once you have someone's address, it's really easy to plug that address in to something like Google Maps, and not only see where on the map that person is, but you can also see satellite pictures of the house. Now, there might not be much you can do about that, but this isn't the only reason online privacy matters.

It matters because any information you put online will never go away. You can delete a photo you posted to Facebook, remove a blog post you wrote, or delete something you Tweeted about, but that doesn't mean it's gone. Why? Because people can save things you post online. Pictures you post can be downloaded and saved. Things you Tweet can be saved as screenshots. And, as the website iKeepSafe points out, you never know what search engines have crawled your information and stored it.

And all of that matters because the details you share online can reveal information about you that you wouldn't otherwise want people to have: where you work, your habits, the places to which you travel.

So, what can you do?

Use a pseudonym

Many of the things I've been reading strongly recommend not using your real name, and instead using pseudonyms online. While this might work for you on Twitter or a blog, it might not work as well on Facebook. It's entirely a personal preference, but be aware that if you use your real name on your social networking sites, it makes it just a little easier to find you. Do a Google search for your name, putting your name in quotes (e.g., "John Doe"). You'd be surprised at what you might find.

Get a post office box

Depending on how you use social media, you might also want to get a post office box. For most of us, this probably isn't a concern, as we typically don't post our addresses online; however, as the Kathleen Hale situation shows us, it's sometimes beneficial to have a post office box that you can use online instead of your address, if you need to do online shopping, if you review products online that have to be mailed to you, etc.

Don't talk about where you are

Many of us love to talk about what we're doing. We use Facebook's check in feature, we post photos of our vacations, and we love to tell our social media followers what we're up to at any given time. And while this is okay for some things--say, if you're want to tell your followers about the amazing book you're reading--it's not as okay for other things.

If you want to talk about your amazing vacation or the day you had at the zoo, that's awesome; however, it might be best to not use Facebook's check in feature and to not post about where you are until you get home. While I've known that not posting online about being on vacation is a good idea, I had never considered not posting about being at the zoo while I'm actually at the zoo. It makes sense, though. If you're posting about your day at the zoo while you're there, guess what? It's now easier to find you. It also means people know you aren't home, so you've made your home vulnerable to break ins.

Disable your mobile device's geotagging feature

Here's another big one that I hadn't thought about before. If you use a smartphone or a tablet to take photos and upload them to social networking websites, make sure the geotagging is turned off. Geotagging embeds the location of where you took a photo into the photo itself, and people who view your photo can also view the embedded location information. Tech-Recipes has a great article on how to turn geotagging off of Androids, iPhones, and Blackberries.

I think, though, that most important thing about online privacy is talking about it: what it is, why it's important, and why it's a good idea to not reveal more information about yourself than you would if you were in a roomful of strangers.

If you have any other ideas on how to protect your online privacy, let us know in the comments!

Two Views of the Wired Life

We live in a wired world. (And, increasingly, wireless.) Whether or not we embrace Internet-facilitated communications we are all affected by them, and are likely to be even more so in the near future. The books below offer thought-provoking discussions as to how the wired life is changing how we interact with information and each other.

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Nicholas Carr wrote an article that was featured on the cover of Atlantic magazine, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" That July 2008 article generated much discussion and even some controversy, and enough interest that Carr expanded upon the article to produce the 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains.

In the article and the book Carr describes how he became aware of a problem in his life: he was rarely if ever finishing a book that he had started to read. At first he chalked it up to getting older. But once he started comparing notes with friends and colleagues he began to see a pattern. No one of his friends, it seemed, was finishing longer works. In fact, everyone seemed to have increasingly brief interactions with print materials. And with media in general. Just about everyone was sampling the information flow around them in quick sips rather than long drinks.

 "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words," says Carr. "Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Carr did research and came to a disturbing conclusion: not only is the way we interact with information changing,  the Internet is changing our brains. Due to "brain plasticity" (the more we do something, the more our brain "muscles up" to perform that action), we are actually rewiring our brains to have a broad and light association with information -- "the shallows" referred to in the title of the book.

Citing recent research, the author discusses how the very nature of the Internet encourages a shallow interaction with information regardless of the content. (Shades of McLuhan's "The medium is the message.") For example: studies show that when hypertext links are present in a text, the reader's retention of the concepts in the text is reduced -- the mere presence of the options to link outward reduces focus upon the material at hand.

The sheer volume of information presented to us is also discussed, how this may be a distraction from a deep linear channel of thought and how this ever-increasing volume makes filtering and critical thinking skills ever more important.

Thought- and discussion-provoking, The Shallows helps us examine how the recent rapid changes in electronic communication may be changing how we interact with the world in ways far beyond what we already recognize.

Some quotes from the book:

"With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use."

"It's possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards."

"The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment."

Nicholas Carr's article in Atlantic Magazine
Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

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Whereas Nicholas Carr suggests that we should examine, discuss, and sometimes even challenge how we utilize Internet-facilitated communications, Michael Chorost suggests that we should take such techologies to their polar extreme: a blending of implanted machine and human to optimize our connection to the information flow, and through that, our connections with each other.

In World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans, Machines and the Internet  (2011) Chorost discusses the technologies that might make such an integration possible, ways to make our interaction with information technologies seamless and intuitive. He also examines the goal of "telempathy" -- not telepathy, an exact mind-to-mind transfer of thoughts or information, but rather a (network-facilitated) telempathic understanding of what other humans are feeling or focusing upon:

"An implanted device would have to do much more than a BlackBerry. It would have to let people be effortlessly aware of what their friends and colleagues are doing. It would have to let them know what their friends are seeing and feeling, thus enabling much richer forms of communication. And people should be able to walk down the street savoring the richness of the world while also being aware, in the background of their minds, of the ceaseless hum of their friends' ideas and experiences."

Chorost (who has microchips implanted in his brain to allow him to hear more clearly) understands that this "ceaseless hum" may not seem attractive to everyone. But since he views such a machine-human integration as being increasingly inevitable, he feels it is vital to discuss the permutations of such an integration and how it will affect individuality, privacy, and society. As a vehicle for this discussion he takes a very personal trip through his comfort zone of personal space and human interaction, in parallel with his examination of the developing technologies.

Whether attractive or repulsive, the idea of a World Wide Mind is sure to generate discussion as we consider the possibilities rushing upon us.

Some quotes from the book:

"There is nothing new about the fear that technology is harming human interaction. People philosophized and worried about telegraphs and telephones in very much the same way that people now philosophize and worry about the Internet. ... The debate about technology's effect on social interaction has been around so long that it is essentially technology-independent. I see it as being about the tension between conflicting desires for autonomy and community. On the one hand we want to be autonomous, and seek space and privacy. On the other hand we want to be known and loved, and seek intimacy and community. These desires are in constant conflict. By constantly introducing new ways to be alone and together, technology keeps renewing the conflict. The conflict endures through the millennia; only the specific technologies change. Rather than try to resolve the conflict, I want to transcend it by introducing a new perspective."

"True communication, deep communication, empathic communication, always requires [a] rich information exchange in both directions. It has to exist between one person and another, but we can't stop there; it also has to exist between humans and machines..."