Boredom and information overload
There’s more to boredom than meets the eye. In an article discussing research about the psychology of boredom, the New York Times writes that sometimes boredom can be a positive thing, allowing the brain time to work through things:
[B]oredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
Fascinating. I’ve often felt that my mind processes information the best when I give it a chance to idle. For instance, I’ll read complicated materials before bed and let my brain process things while I sleep. When I awake, things often seem to have gelled. Although the mental processes associated with sleep are likely quite different from those associated with boredom, it would seem that in both instances, the brain sometimes needs to detach in order to wade through information overload.
New report coming on “How Much Information”
A new “How Much Information” study is being undertaken, to update previous reports done in 2000 and 2003. The HMI study’s site states:
An updated and expanded study of information growth, conducted by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship, will complete an update of the 2003 Berkeley report by the end of the year. The 2008 report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, LSI, Oracle, Seagate and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and spanning three research universities, UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley.
Hat tip to Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch.
Tiger Woods, distractions, and laptops in the classroom
I was awe-struck during the recent U.S. Open Championship, where Tiger Woods won a nerve-wracking 19-hole playoff on the fifth day. The whole time, Woods suffered from a torn ACL and a double-stress fracture in his leg. Not only was he often in visible pain when taking a shot: he also had to walk a 7000+ yard course five times. Yet he remained focused, tuning out everything, including his own considerable pain.
Around the same time, I read Maggie Jackson’s post at Nanci Alboher’s blog about Jackson’s new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Citing an expert in the field of “interruption science,” Jackson states that knowledge workers switch tasks on average every three minutes. Once distracted, they take a half-hour to return to their original task. Jackson notes that “[in] meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost.”
Substitute “meetings” with “law school” and one sees a pretty accurate image of what can happen in classrooms with laptops. I would imagine that Jackson would agree that banning laptops would enhance the classroom experience. As she states in her posting (albeit not on the topic of laptops):
We are born interrupt-driven -– that’s how humans stay tuned to their environment. But if we jump on every e-mail or ping, we’ll have trouble pursuing our long-term goals. To make inroads on the deep, messy work of life, we need to stay focused, bringing the spotlight of our attention back again and again to the work at hand.
Chinese censorship and the infoglut
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about his experiments in testing Chinese censorship of the internet. (See In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens, June 20, 2006, subscription required.) Kristof started two Chinese-language blogs and filled them with politically charged postings. He was surprised that the posts were quickly available online, with only an occasional — and apparently automated, I would think — substitution of asterisks for certain Chinese characters.
Commenting on the quick availability of his blogs, Kristof observes that it’s impossible for China’s 30,000 censors to keep up with 120 million Chinese netizens. This might be correct: the sheer quantity of internet information makes absolute control pretty much impossible. But Kristof further concludes that “the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries.” As Ethan Leib notes at PrawfsBlawg, he’s not as optimistic as Kristof, and I agree. The fact that Kristof’s postings went online mostly unscathed likely says more about the ineffectiveness of filtering programs than about governmental permissiveness. Getting things on the web and keeping them there are not the same.
To his credit, Kristof recognized that his postings might not last long, predicting that “[w]hen State Security reads this, it may finally order my blogs closed.” His prediction was proven correct, and quickly. Though the blogs were online last night, when I checked this afternoon they were gone. One, http://jisidao.blog.sohu.com/, now apparently says that the user does not exist. (Caveat: I don’t read Chinese and used Babelfish to translate.) The other, http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1238333873, now redirects the user to the main page at http://blog.sina.com.cn/main/. Almost certainly it was humans — and not programs — that removed the sites. Automated and human censorship in China apparently work hand in hand.
Kristof’s observations do contain some seeds of optimism that Chinese censorship can be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures. He writes that young people use proxy software to reach forbidden sites and Skype to make phone calls. He also writes about Chinese blogger Li Xinde, “who travels around China with his laptop, reporting on corruption and human-rights abuses.” Xinde’s sites are closed down constantly, but “the moment a site is censored he replaces it with a new one.” Xinde uses an overseas site, http://www.lixinde.com, to inform readers of the best current internet address.
Nonetheless, I have to wonder how many Chinese citizens engage in these activities or risk imprisonment to blog about politically charged subjects. Even though automated and human censorship might be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures, the will to take such risks must exist as well. As Ethan Leib notes, “it is hard to blog from a Chinese prison.” How does one counteract fear?
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A blog on IP, information, and technology by Professor Ira Nathenson, St. Thomas Univ. School of Law. Nothing on this site is intended as legal advice.
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