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So I planned on reading a ton of books this summer... or at least 11. I gave a crack at 4 and barely opened the other 7, but here they are, in glorious alphabetical order (which unfortunately means the bitchiest sounding book is first):
Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). New York: Tarcher, 2008.

Beck, John C., and Thomas H. Davenport. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. New York: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (October Books). London: The Mit Press, 2001.

Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.

James, William. "The Principles of Psychology ." Classics in the History of Psychology. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/index.htm (accessed August 25, 2009).

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York, NY: Picador, 2002.

Lanham, Richard A.. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Meyer, David E. Attention and Performance. Volume XIV.. London: The Mit Press, 1993.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1986.

Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice). London: The Mit Press, 2008.

While I've complained enough about Rapt, I've also dived into Suspensions of Perception, one of the attention economy books, a bit of the William James and a crack of Attention and Performance, largest book ever.

We were also tasked with writing a little introduction to what we're thinking about for our theses so I'll post that here. It's rough but it's as good as introduction as I'm going to write today.

The direction for my thesis work is attention and the lack of space within the context of media and information overload. Attention as a subject has changed dramatically since the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. In recent years there has been a near explosion in media types and new technologies. I find, however, that these new media and technologies do very little to simplify existence or create space–something I find lacking in current society. Tech seems to over-complicate, fracture and otherwise indefinitely distract people. By researching attention from both a theoretical/philosophical standpoint and from a scientific/technical standpoint I hope to find ways to use current technology to alleviate the strain of media. In very simple terms I want to take what people are discovering about cognitive science and attention and use it to design, redesign or make obsolete a current time-consuming system. Right now I am thinking of language-based multitasking and what kinds of verbal tasks might be otherwise directed in tactile tasks, the kinds of things your muscles learn to do. This could, however, change with more research. The desired result of such a project is to help create space in one’s life.


I wrote a couple more lines but this is the majority. Also, I'm vaguely referring to my thoughts on tangible computing in the second to last line but only because I really have not researched anything enough to know how useful sorting email with one's fingers would actually be. Would it be anything other than novel to have, say, an email bracelet that changed texture when you got a new email so you could effectively ignore spams, mailing list emails and bulk mail while paying attention to personal letters and whatnot? I don't know. It might be cool but it could be totally useless or worse, complicate an already complicated and irritating system.

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