Once encoding in the material base has taken place, it cannot easily be changed. Print and proteins in this sense have more in common with each other than with magnetic encodings, which can be erased and rewritten simply by changing the polarities.
| You are a Social Liberal (83% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (18% permissive) You are best described as a:
Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test |
The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging [from incoming email messages] makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.
"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.
Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?
To figure this out, [Mary Czerwinski] took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.
Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.
This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?
In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.
Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.
So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.
One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.
For me, my previous adult novel, "American Gods," was very much about what happens when you're English and you come to stay in a country that you've seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you're noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it's weird....The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story.
