abject learning

Imagine my surprise when I had finally finished up the arduous and death-defying task of getting the boy ready for daycare, herded him out the door, and Bandido Rojo… was… not there.

A confirmation call later, there really was no other explanation. Someone had stolen the car off our quiet street while we slept thirty or so feet away (with the bedroom window open). I am at a loss to explain why someone would want a fifteen year old subcompact car (though I know from hard experience that replacement parts for this model do cost a fortune), and anyone who wanted a joyride would surely find the performance of our mean machine somewhat joyless.

Hardly a tragedy. And the police may recover the beast yet — I was told by the cops that if I found the car I was not to drive it, apparently their policy is to apprehend drivers of stolen cars at gunpoint. But plenty of hassle with insurance and alternate travel arrangements — which together have managed to suck up most of a day that was way over-booked already.

We bought Bandido Rojo seven years ago and took it straight to Mexico, where it endured bad gas, bad roads, bad driving, insane mechanics and intense heat. It never really recovered from its year of living dangerously, but it stubbornly refused to die.

If I never see you again — vaya con dios, el carro valiente…

Info
Originally uploaded by courtneyp.

Among the things I’ve been brooding over lately is the notion of information overload… It’s one of those tricky concepts that most people intuitively understand on some sort of common sense level, and it’s widely acknowledged to be a defining characteristic of contemporary life in the industrialised world. Yet when you pay attention to how the term is used, it becomes clear how often it sits there as a largely unexamined condition, deployed to serve all manner of fuzzy observations and contradictory assertions.

A story which made the rounds yesterday was headlined ‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana (does this mean that over at Erowid they might start forums for people who think Infomania is even cooler than marijuana?). From the HP (sponsoring organization) press release:

Far from making workers more productive, the findings of a new scientific experiment reveal that those who “over juggle” and who constantly disrupt meetings and important tasks to read and respond to messages, significantly reduce their IQ. In a series of tests carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson, Reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, an average worker’s functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming emails. This drop in IQ is more than double the four point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana 2 . Similarly, research on sleep deprivation suggests that an IQ drop of ten points is equal to missing an entire night of sleep 3 . This IQ drop was even more significant in men who took part in the tests.

Oh, where to begin…

I’ll acknowledge that on a personal, wholly uninformed personal level, it does not seem unreasonable to assert that being bombarded by information (and the expectation of contributing to the churn) might distract and confuse a human being. But the way this effect is described indicates a quantitative reductionism almost stunning in its simplicity. Overwork, sleep deprivation and smoking bong hits are radically different subjective experiences (or so I have read), whatever the effects on productivity.

And as Gardner Campbell observes, “suddenly IQ seems a noncontroversial measure of performance.” He also links to this fine breakdown of the story by Mark Liberman, which offers some useful skepticism (noting that it’s possible that “nothing ever will be published — this is a privately commissioned study described in a press release, with some quotes from the author in the resulting popular-press articles”) and background on the lead researcher:

I certainly don’t expect newspaper stories to be like scientific journal articles, but couldn’t they give us one or two sentences about how the IQ study was actually carried out? I’m not just being a fuss-budget here. Think about it. Were the subjects people whose work and social lives normally require email? If so, were they in effect being compared in normal life and on vacation? Or if they were not normally users of email, were they being tested while trying to master a new set of skills such as typing and computer use? If the study was done in a lab setting with concocted emails to read and answer, what was the control activity? Or were subjects simply tested before and after a day of intensive email interaction? Was it even a within-subjects design, with the same subjects tested with and without email and similar distractions, or did the study compare the effects of a day at work on subjects who used email and text messaging vs. subjects who didn’t? Without answers to questions like these, I’m not convinced that such a study necessarily tested the things attributed to it at all. (And some answers might well convince me that the study definitely didn’t test what is claimed for it.)

The author of the IQ portion of the study is this Glenn Wilson, said to be an expert in "Personality; sexual behaviour; male-female differences; social behaviour; performing arts psychology; fame and celebrity". He’s previously written an apparently controversial popular book called The Great Sex Divide; another apparently controversial book called The Psychology of Conservatism; found (surprisingly large if true) differences in startle responses based on sex and sexual orientation; examined the role of hormones in the physiology of "love junkies"; and studied the psychological benefits of bubble baths.

Most of the mainstream media reports (Liberman links to a pile of them) simply repeat the prepackaged story more or less verbatim. Among the stenographers is the vaunted Chronicle of Higher Educations reasonable digital-drawn facsimile of a weblog. I’ve been detecting a significant uptick of gum-flapping and harumph-harumphing from major media outlets about the immaturity and unreliability of weblogging lately. This particular instance illustrates quite clearly how dramatically and rapidly the news game is changing, and not in favour of large centralized media behemoths, whose economic prerogatives increasingly preclude basic analysis of pre-fabricated newslike substances.

I’ve signed up for a PubSub feed on “information overload” — which, to bring the info-feedback loop into a full screaming iterative frenzy, today brings me a link from my friend Wendy Farmer’s prodigious new blog, a post in which she links back to me.

Today this weblog was on the receiving end of a mashup. The resulting text is more coherent and lucid than the source material:

My presentation on wikis required me to make it easy and fun to get to the remarkably rich collections of resources that are worth saving, but which have already been discussed on other things, but that’s another boring story…) Seb says, “Somebody get this month’s installment done. As it happened, I managed to bash out some of the stray bits of data churning about in my view you’d be insane not to raise my cudgel to the game played in my laptop actually captured my voice better than my iSight mic. Hmmm. I say “um” and “uh” A LOT.

Here’s a Biology Professor that can generate some seriously intense vibes — in this case directed at the poor sap who stole his laptop during a previous class.

“I’m the only hope you’ve got of staying out of deeper trouble than you or any student that I’ve ever known has ever been in.”

RealPlayer Link (Scan to 48:50).

This just got the Boing Boing treatment, so it may not last long.

Maybe I was feeling a little buzzed by the subject matter of my previous post, or maybe I was just feeling info-logged, but whatever it was about forty-five minutes ago I could tell that my brain was not operating properly. So I took a sanity break for a quick walk along the wooded Pacific coastline that is less than ten minutes on foot from my office. I gave thanks not only for working on such a stunning campus, but also for having a work environment humane enough for me to wander off freely when I need to (most of them haven’t been).

I didn’t really get anywhere thinking through the relation between physical, emotional and intellectual well-being, or about information overload, or about the full implications of an impending energy crisis (like I said, my mind was all over the place). I was just starting to head back to the office when Stephen Downes’s formulation of information as a flow popped into my head — not artifacts that you collect but a torrent that you try to navigate and redirect. There’s a lot I like about his comparison of information to electricity and water, it intuitively fits with how I feel when I’m on top of my info-streams, and I have taken to quoting that riff regularly during presentations and workshops. Downes returned to this theme yesterday in challenging the “premise …that campus computing is contributing to information overload, and that the solution is to turn off the computer once in a while,” arguing that “this just makes information overload worse, because the information doesn’t stop piling up just because you’ve logged off. The key (in my mind) is to stop treating information like a thing, stop treating it as though it were a pile of required reading, but to sample and filter and redirect, to taste and digest and manipulate as needed. Information management is a skill, like kayaking, and needs to be practiced.”

Maybe it was the forested path and the coastal view, but only then did it fully occur to me that a natural consequence of de-objectifying information is to think of it as disposable. Now, “disposable” is not a word that has positive connotations for me — when I hear “disposable” I think about plastic and styrofoam clogging landfills, or vast aisles of heavily-packaged goods in soul-shattering big box stores. I think “waste”. Does conceptualising an ephemeral stream of collective consciousness render individual intellectual work as at best insignificant, or even laden with toxic byproducts? Or do books and paintings and all of the other physical artifacts (and attendant institutions) give culture an illusory sense of substance and permanence? And maybe that illusion is being flushed away by digital culture… (Note to self: read Benjamin again.)

Maybe I should look closer at Downes’s metaphor, focus on the comparision to water and energy part, and think of information not as disposable goods, but as something that is always readily available (at least for now, and only to those sufficiently privileged to be connected, but never mind). Something that is managed, delivered and maintained by experts, a resource that can be conserved (and polluted and thoughtlessly squandered, but never mind).

I recognise that I am indulging in fallacy here — metaphors are only metaphors, and just because two things resemble one another in a certain respect does not mean that they are identical in every way. Then again, I wonder to what extent tensions between higher ed and digital cultural might be exacerbated by the status of intellectual aftifacts in the age of digital (re)production. Anybody know something I should be reading?

Posts like these happen when I take walks in the afternoon. Please refrain from sending missives to my boss demanding that she chain me to my desk.

Co-worker asleep
Originally uploaded by ldandersen.

After struggling to drag my sleepy self onto the bus to work this morning, my daily paper greeted me with a headline admonishing that If you slept till 5:30 this morning, you slept in. What followed in the article below was a litany of boasts from manic workaholics:

He allocates 60 hours for work, 45 for sleep (he often naps from 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. and catches up on weekends), 21 for family, seven for meditation, seven for family finance, seven for volunteering and four for exercise. Seventeen hours a week are “flex time.”

“They say what gets measured gets improved,” he said.

Mr. Jamal is one of many Canadians who are sleeping less and waking earlier to tackle heavy workloads, gain a competitive edge or squeeze in exercise.

Indeed, snoozing until dawn, it seems, is for losers. Waking when the rooster crows “means simply running with the pack,” The New York Times noted wryly in a recent article that dubbed getting up before dawn “competitive waking.”

As Donald Trump, who goes to bed at 1 a.m. and rises at 5 a.m., wrote in Think Like a Billionaire: ” . . . it gives me a competitive edge. I have friends who are successful and sleep ten hours a night, and I ask them, ‘How can you compete against people like me if I sleep only four hours?’ It rarely can be done. No matter how brilliant you are, there’s not enough time in the day.”

And they’re passing the lifestyle onto others:

As many a subordinate knows, when a boss has a BlackBerry — often called CrackBerrys because they are so addictive — attached to the hip, he or she will use it.

When Susan Murray awakes at about 6:15 a.m., she counts on a handful of waiting messages from her boss, federal Public Works Minister Scott Brison. Knowing he is an early riser makes Ms. Murray, his communications director and “not a morning person,” get up earlier than she otherwise would.

Mr. Brison said he wakes up at 4:40 a.m., but added: “I don’t know if it’s that early.” At his office, he reads a stack of newspapers and fires off messages to his staff. He then works out in the House of Commons gym, and between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., begins hearing back from his staff.

“I do think that the team only runs as fast as the leader of the team. I set a pretty fast pace,” said Mr. Brison, who usually goes to bed at about 10:30 p.m. and steals a 15-minute nap during the day.

When he was chief executive officer of Rogers Cable, John Tory, now Leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, noticed that his employees began arriving earlier because they knew he started work at 6:15 a.m.

“There was no question some of the hours changed, and look, I caused that to happen a bit because I would schedule meetings” at 7 a.m. or 7:30 a.m. After he left the company, people made sure to tell him the early schedule had been shelved.

A tyranny of the obsessed. If this sort of circadian madness is posited as a miracle cure to boost productivity, then we know our culture of work has gone off the rails.

To be fair, the article quotes a few disapproving doctors and researchers who have documented the ill-effects for a culture that is already not getting enough sleep:

“We’re deluding ourselves into thinking we can squeeze more out of the day by burning the candle at both ends,” said Jeffrey Lipsitz, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Centre of Metropolitan Toronto.

Today’s hyper-connected, 24-hour, seven-days-a-week society is a key reason people on all rungs of the ladder are cutting back on rest. Although doctors once told patients to seek refuge in a book if they were tossing and turning, they now admonish people to refrain from taking to bed laptops or BlackBerry e-mail devices and personal digital assistants.

“When you stop to think about it, is it any wonder that people are so wired, literally and figuratively?” Dr. Lipsitz asked. [Emphasis added]

But overall, I’d say that the article’s tone is one of admiration for these hard-charging go-getters, who have triumphed over limitations of the flesh. It’s easy to overestimate the significance of pieces like these, but it ties in to so many of my own frustrations and fears about the hidden costs of contemporary working life. Most people I know are working extraordinarily hard, often to the detriment of their emotional and physical well-being — and I would argue to the detriment of their work as well. Could I have been the only tired commuter for whom the front page really read: “Rev it up, because your competition never sleeps”?