Information Overload

Getting unhooked on tech or how to reclaim your humanity

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Jan 072022

“Technology: your master, or your friend? Do you feel ruled by your smartphone and enslaved by your e-mail or social-network activities? Digital technology is making us miserable, say bestselling authors and former tech executives Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever. We’ve become a tribe of tech addicts—and it’s not entirely our fault.
”Taking advantage of vulnerabilities in human brain function, tech companies entice us to overdose on technology interaction. This damages our lives, work, families, and friendships. Swipe-driven dating apps train us to evaluate people like products, diminishing our relationships. At work, we e-mail on average 77 times a day, ruining our concentration. At home, light from our screens is contributing to epidemic sleep deprivation.
”But we can reclaim our lives without dismissing technology. The authors explain how to avoid getting hooked on tech and how to define and control the roles that tech is playing and could play in our lives. And they provide a guide to technological and personal tools for regaining control. This readable book turns personal observation into a handy action guide to adapting to our new reality of omnipresent technology.” [From the publisher’s website]

Your Happiness Was Hacked : Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain — and How to Fight Back. Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever. Oakland, CA: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2018.

Will mathematical models and algorithms decide our fate?

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Dec 292021

$Weapons of Math Destruction$

“Weapons of Math Destruction traces the arc of a person’s life, from school to retirement, and looks at models that score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole and prison sentences, and monitor our health. The models being used are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: if a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his race or neighborhood), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. O’Neil has dubbed these harmful models Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs. In our society, where money buys influence, WMD victims are nearly voiceless. These models are propping up the lucky and punishing the poor and oppressed, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. But the poor are hardly the only victims of WMDs. They hit the middle class, too. Even the rich find themselves microtargeted by political models.” [From the Publisher’s website]

Weapons of Math Destruction : How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Cathy O’Neil. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2017.

In a digital world, back to the almighty pen and paper

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May 062018

So much information, apps, social networks to maintain, plus so many gadgets plus the to-do lists (if you have a modicum of organization) and in the meantime your life is happening. “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”, is a saying attributed to John Lennon, but it was actually the American journalist and cartoonist Allen Saunders who said it first. No, I’m not digressing.

The Bullet Journal Method, now in the form of a book, “the analog method for the digital age”, is for anyone struggling to find their place in the digital age. It will help you get organized by providing simple tools and techniques that can inject clarity, direction, and focus into your days. As great as getting organized feels, however, it’s just the surface of something significantly deeper and more valuable, says the author. It’s all about tracking the Past, ordering the Present and designing the Future. There are many a follower of this sort of cult productivity system which, if we are to believe them, it actually works. For instance, this article in the Financial Times, Why I started a bullet journal — and so should you.

The bullet journal method : track the past, order the present, design the future. Ryder Carroll. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2018.

Related Website: Bullet Journal

Your brain is on a new kind of psychedelic stimulant

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Aug 022017

This is not just a book about Internet consumerism, but rather a study in neuropsychology which exposes the other dark reality of a tool apparently we can live without: the Internet. The initial question of the author was actually “Is Google making us stupid?” and the gradual loss of our ability to sit down still and browse the pages of a book or a magazine. Besides the physiological and psychological effects of an addiction to information, how is technology messing up our brains? There are at least “7 ways technology is making you stupid:” First of all, it is screwing up your sleep and your internal clock. Two, it is making you more distracted and and even less efficient academically, if you are a student. Three, there isn’t much you can remember as your long-term memory is not appropriately fed by your transient working memory being continually interrupted. Four, you are more forgetful as multitasking technology keeps you unfocused. Five, you can’t concentrate on what you’re reading since it may get much harder to absorb information wrapped up in a multimedia format. Six, you can’t find your way around without the assistance of GPS as your hippocampus (that component of your brains involved in spatial navigation and the creation of “cognitive maps”) is not exercised. Seven, your brain isn’t unlike the brain of a drug addict or even an alcoholic person if you spend too much time on the Internet. Too much of a good thing can’t be good.

The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains. Nicholas Carr. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Related Website: The Shallows.

Too much information is causing Information Obesity

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Mar 242015

Have you come across folks carrying an iPad or a smartphone and “reading” the news or simply browsing, but not reading, a huge number of publications? Not to mention the proud feeling of just being the owners of one (or more) of these extraordinary gadgets? Well, whether you are carring a tablet or a laptop computer, or sitting at home or office in front of an Internet browser, that will undoubtedly put a humongous amount of information (and misinformation) readily available to you in an instant. However, that does not change the fact that you still have to read it and digest it. The whole process has not changed, but “Information overconsumption” is what permeates our society. You still need to have good “information habits” in your “information diet” in order to avoid getting Information Obesity, and the goal of the author, Clay A. Johnson, is to show you how, whether you are a “liberal” or a “conservative”. Johnson, a former transparency advocate in Washington D.C., draws a clever parallel between our food consumption and our information consumption (hence, for instance, the theme of the book cover), and he believes that this is just not a fancy metaphor but a harsh reality and that a “conscious consumption of information is possible”, lest more and more proofs of information indigestion keep cropping up in the media, like that oxymoronic protest sign that read: Keep your government hands off my Medicare. Learn more about the incongruences that even people considered intelligent and educated utter in public more often than not, as just one of the many symptoms of this modern epidemic.

The information diet: a case for conscious consumption. Clay A. Johnson. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2012. First edition, second release.