Multi-tasking and the Wired Generation

Here's a link to a fascinating look at the true efficacy (or lack thereof) of multitasking in today's digital world:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791/

As I type this, I have four tabs open in my browser so that I can monitor my email, select a playlist that fits my mood from Pandora Radio, check the weather for my morning run tomorrow, and write this post. I also have my iPhone right next to the keyboard. Yet I don't consider myself to be multi-tasking right now. There are days when I might be running software analyzing ground penetrating radar data, checking my email, drafting a report, and listening to my iPod. That's a light day of multi-tasking for me.

I have to wonder how truly effective those days really are after watching this Frontline video. Thoughts?

Alone Together

Dr. Sherry Turkle, who we saw last week in the video clip that spoke about how we are all distracted by technology (click here to see the entire Frontline episode) has just published a book on the subject called Alone Together.

As this article points out, she is a professor of the social studies of science at MIT and bases her work on the anthropological data collection method known as ethnography (which we will be talking about in class on Tuesday). As she points out in this interview, she is no Luddite, but feels that:

"Every technology becomes our partner, because we make it, and then it makes and shapes us in return, and it takes a little time for us to see how that process of mutual unfolding goes. Every technology gives us the opportunity to say, Is this technology serving our human values? And if not, the opportunity to make corrections. This book is meant to be part a conversation to make corrections. I think there are ways in which we're constantly communicating and yet not making enough good connections, in a way that's to our detriment, to the detriment of our families and to our business organizations."

Language, Culture, and Empathy in Chimpanzees

This is a cool overview article on the complexity of chimpanzee social and cognitive behavior. One of the more interesting points is that chimpanzees are able to outperform humans in some memory tests, about recalling series of numbers, which might suggest that a trade-off for language is immediate memory.

They also talk about tool use and empathy, such as for Knuckles the chimp with cerebral palsy (above) who is treated with consideration even by the high-ranking males of his social group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17chimp.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2