Strategies for managing online distraction from Steven Pinker

Psychologist Steven Pinker has a terrific op-ed in the New York Times this morning, responding to the recent flurry of press about how the Internet is destroying the quality of our attention and thinking. Here’s my favorite part of his article: Yes, the constant...

Good news for Internet users who need a boost

Happy News is a site that accentuates the positive: it promises to deliver only good news stories. You wouldn’t want to make it your only source of information, but when the endless stories of crime and conflict get you down, here’s a nice way to balance...

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Not addiction; dependency

Nicholas Carr has genius take on the conversation about “Internet addiction”: By dismissing talk of “Internet addiction” as rhetorical overkill, which it is, we also avoid undertaking an honest examination of how deeply our media devices have...

Can a mobile phone make you sane instead of crazy?

Aaron Bellve of Spit, Bristle and Fury (killer blog title, BTW!) has a thoughtful post about an NPR story on the dawn of therapy by mobile phone. Cell phones, rather than augmenting our human encounters, are replacing them and in something as complex, sensitive and...

The return of “I don’t know”

Fifteen years ago, “I don’t know” was a regular part of our vocabulary. And then it all changed. I remember the night, shortly after I got my first high-speed connection, when a group of my friends were over and got into a conversation about Clifford...

Missing out on Twitter

I made a number of confessions in my Northern Voice talk on Coping with Social Media, and in Gillian Shaw’s related story for the Vancouver Sun. But the one that was met with the most surprise — and in a couple of cases, horror — was the revelation...

6 Ways to Get Wired and Inspired

We tend to think of setting goals and seeking inspiration as highly personal. But achieving our goals is not always a solitary pursuit: The encouragement and resources of a larger community can help us do something we couldn’t do alone. Your computer can support both sides of this equation.