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Every surprising bit of new behavior described here has two common elements: people had the opportunity to behave in a way that rewarded some intrinsic motivation, and those opportunities were enabled by technology but created by human beings. Those bits of new behavior, though, are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns o... See more

Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

For most of history, humanity’s challenge was how to acquire scarce information. There was hardly any good information to be found anywhere. It was locked up in difficult-to-reproduce manuscripts or stuck in the heads of scholars. Access to information was limited, but that wasn’t a problem for most people. Their lives and livelihoods didn’t requir

Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33] This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015.

Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.

Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment

our contemporary world has privatized much of public life. We retreat into our homes, onto our screens, and into our echo chambers. Immersing ourselves in information mediated by algorithms. Always connected, yet rarely connecting with one another. The result is we are less and less practiced in the craft of conversation, our ability to hear one an

Seth Goldenberg • Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.

Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

And at the same time, I think that the group of people who, by luck or by temperament, proved very, very good at using the internet, to some degree, distracts from the many, many, many people for whom the internet is fundamentally a distraction machine, or for whom the internet is creating, because of what we built on it. You know, shorter attentio... See more

Ezra Klein • Opinion | We Know Shockingly Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper

We could use better tools, too. Since their very design affects how we use them, how about forms of social media that don’t focus so narrowly on what’s happening right this instant?