No Time to Think

Google Tech Talks
March, 5 2008

ABSTRACT

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

Speaker: David M. Levy
David Levy earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1979 and a Diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute (London) in 1983. For more than fifteen years he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where his work, described in "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (Arcade, 2001), centered on exploring the transition from paper and print to digital. During the year 2005-2006, he was the holder of the Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress. A professor at the UW Information School since 2000-2001, he has been investigating how to restore contemplative balance to a world marked by information overload, fragmented attention, extreme busyness, and the acceleration of everyday life.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• google
• techtalks
• techtalk
• engedu
• talk
• talks
• googletechtalks
• education

[particulateman]

What if, the entire "problem" of information overload is not "work load" but rather our current wealth.

Today, we can choose to buy what was never available to individuals before. Two hundred years ago a successful person might need to labor or study for 14-16 hours a day to attain a life we would now consider poor.

Today, it's possible to be relatively successful with very little effort. We can use this spare time any way we wish, but most choose to remain "busy" rather than still.

[johnsharer]

I first met Dr. Levy in 1970, when we were suitemates at our undergraduate college. Dr. Levy is one of the most thoughtful and profund thinkers I had ever met. From this talk, it is apparent that Dr. Levy still amply deserves that distinction.

[ProfessorCosmic]

We have forgotten leisure as “non-activity” —an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. Leisure is the form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, whoever is not still cannot hear... it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real —a co-respondence, eternally established in nature— has not yet descended into words. Pieper, 1948.

[MrStarchild3001]

It's DATA OVERLOAD not information overload---nobody makes the distinction, but it's huge.

[KeystoneDeKript]

@comeonewtf Heh, I am a nerd so thanks for the compliment, but no I haven't yet been invited to speak at google. His point isn't that technology is bad. Take a cathedral for example, when you are there with only a few other tourists, everyone speaks very quietly because they can hear their own voices extremely well. If you fill that room with people then the echos will drown out an individual. If you design technology in a loud way then you wont be able to think... That's his point

[comeonewtf]

@KeystoneDeKript What's not to understand? You sound like an old man who's frustrated and intimidated with technology. Come to think of it you're probably the speaker in the video!

[KeystoneDeKript]

@comeonewtf Which means you just don't understand. Are you an academic? Because you sound like a 16 year old. If you want to know what he is thinking about I suggest a(nother) degree!

[comeonewtf]

"We are at a point where we're thinking how much more do we really want and need?" This guy's an idiotic fool. I'll tell you how much we haven't even scratched the surface of how much we want and need from technology you Neanderthal!

[cylob82]

@blackacidlizzard how is the "something can't come from nothing" argument "self-defeating"? huh? its proof of something which will forever defy our logic

[flowewritharoma]

but I should think this matter.

[mjthomas43]

I'm glad that librarianship was mentioned.  LIS of course has much more to do.