OT: Data Smog

[Baron Munchausen]

Are you constantly rushing just to keep up with email correspondance? Are you always doing a half-dozen things at once and not getting any of them done? An article in the Seattle Times describes the study of 'data smog' or 'cognitive overload' or whatever you want to call it. Does this sound familiar?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pac...128/cover.html

[geoschmo]

I'll read this when I get the time.

[Aiken]

I always say to my boss that I'm not a multitasking device. Unfortunately, he always refuses to understand this

[Kamog]

I know what you mean. It seems that I get interrupted a lot at work. While I'm working on my project, people come up to me and say, "do you have a minute?", "can you come help me with this problem?", and when I'm in the middle of helping the person, somebody else interupts and want me to do something else.

[deccan]

Get a good secretary...

[Atrocities]

The seattle times is not a source for news and information that I, nor mose washingtonians, would trust.

[Arkcon]

I heard about this over on /. And I just seems to me like people want to whine about how our modern culture is worse than the good old days. Thing is its not the people suffering under modern technology who feel this way -- just that there are some people whose job it is to make a comment on our culture. Meh.

Here's a question. What is multitasking, applied to human behavior, I'm not talking about computer operating systems here.

Say you're working, and you get an email. You're not really multitasking if you drop a task to address an email -- you're just switching tasks as time permits. We may do this a lot more often than people realize.

Example, who didn't listen to the radio or T.V while doing homework? Teachers said that that was a bad idea, you weren't concentrating properly. But I couldn't work in a silent environment, it just didn't make sense to me.

'Spose a couple 100 years ago, some lady tended to her mending, while rocking a baby to sleep. Multitasking? Sure, why not? So is such behavior stressful? Evil?

[Suicide Junkie]

The tasks in this sense are the major ones that require near full-concentration.

Walking and chewing are not really tasks.
Tracking the time and updating the mouse pointer aren't really tasks.

To convert from a computer view to the human view is to imagine one computing second or modest fraction thereof as equal to an 8-hour workday.

Zip, a day goes by. The organic unit has answered x calls, and made Y progress on the two major unrelated projects in progress.
Context switching takes a few seconds of that 8-hour day... switching to the phone isn't noticed much because of the automatic handshaking process when you pick up "hello... hello" that covers your switching time.
Then when you switch back from the call, you sit for a second or two going "ok, now where was I... ah."

Plus if you get overloaded with switches, you'll overflow your mental stack and completely forget what you were originally doing before the interruptions started.

[Instar]

Part of this problem I think is of computer UI. I can describe a task in 10 seconds that would take me 30 mins of work to do on a computer. The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

[Aiken]

Instar said:
The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

Holy dead cow, they invented /bin/bash! Again.