Greetings,

  I'm working through Information Ecologies by Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day, and I was surprised to see how closely the questions I'm interested in mirror the ones addressed in the book.  The big question in the book is not whether an over-reliance on technology is good or bad but rather how it is affecting us.  I see a lot to like about the technology we use, but I also see drawbacks.  I want to be a good user of technology and a smart one. 

  I am connected to my computer most of the time I am not at my serving job  (am I'm even connected to it a great deal when I'm at my other job as a writing tutor).  Like most of you, I use the Internet for research, to general acquire new information, and to communicate with my teachers, classmates, and other aquaintenances.  I type all of my papers (believe me, my writing is indistinguishable to everyone but me) on the computer too.  These are all positive things and mostly productive activities. 

  But what is this doing to me?  Since I began typing a short time ago, I checked both my email and my twitter account twice.  I always check my email, even when I'm not expecting any important messages.  I check my twitter too just to see what other people are saying.  When I take these mini-breaks, I often will check multiple sites and even a few radio stations.  It can be really killer for my productivity.  If I don't check these things, I worry that I'm missing something .  As I write this, I remembered that I had to play a cd in my stereo as well (I could have put the disk in my computer, but my laptop's speakers are lousy, so I had to stop what I was doing to put the disk in my stereo). 

The point here, for me, is that for every good thing that technology allows me to do, there is another distraction that it provides, another rabbit hole to follow, or another shiny object to grab.  How do I rectify this? Some will probably say that these things are natural, and maybe they are. But discipline has to come in somewhere.  There needs to be a time when I say "no" to myself, I won't check my email, twitter, change the cd, or anything else until my work is done.  This is perhaps not too big of a problem for most people, but it is for me.  I have limited time because I'm working so much, and I have such poor sleeping habits.  In the end, I need to learn to become the master of technology, and not let it be the master of me.   

Comments are welcome. 

Joe

Via @timoreilly, Add-Art replaces online advertisements with curated art images via a Firefox plug-in:

This will obviously raise eyebrows in the the advertising community, as well as in companies that depend on advertisement revenues. But it also raises important questions about authorship, the dissemination of art, hacking theory, and web site design.

Who, for example, is the author of a web site with an add-art replacement? What are the ethics of hacking the site to replace, for example, the New York Times' rotating selection of advertisements in certain locations? Eye tracking studies have shown us that users are now reading web pages in an F pattern that essentially makes invisible most web page advertisements (which very often appear in the space between the two horizontal lines in the F). Could this impact the way we read? Or, more exactly, what we pay attention to on web pages? These kinds of hacks are exciting because they help show how maleable texts are and how antiquated the term "single-authorship" is.

I'm curious to hear what the IAOC community thinks of this. See the add-art web site for installation instructions. Cross-posted at Composing Spaces.