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Remarks by Joe Krauss on "SlowTech"

http://joekraus.com/were-creating-a-culture-of-distraction

Some companies, particularly in Europe, are starting to enforce time away from e-mail during nonwork hours. Volkswagen has programmed its e-mail servers to stop sending messages to many of its German employees after their shifts end. Atos Origin, a French IT company, has plans to end internal company e-mail entirely, claiming it is a waste of time—only 15 of the 100 e-mails its average employee received each day were deemed useful.

http://m.technologyreview.com/business/40325/

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

Turkle, Sherry (2012) "The Flight from Conversation," New York Times, accessed April 25, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html

But even if we're not tumbling down stairwells, inserting a digital filter between us and the world risks sacrificing something important about our daily interactions and experiences. We give away a little more of our ability to be present and engaged in meaningful ways.

Google's Internet glasses a window into isolation http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/05/BU7U1NVHJV.DTL

I like getting more done, faster, as much as the next guy does. But I also recognize how costly it can be. Speed is the enemy of depth, nuance, subtlety, attention to detail, reflection, learning, and rich relationships — the enemy of much, in short, that makes life worth living.

Tony Schwartz "Slow Down, You Move to Fast" Harvard Business Review, April 3, 2012

The Calming Technology Lab (CTL) at Stanford University is an inter-disciplinary group of scholars, designers, and builders that are inventing and evaluating technologies that create states of calm.

To the question about social media and solitude, my short answer is that I think Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies is still the wisest diagnosis of the consequences of consumer electronics for culture. Inwardness, deep reading, imaginative immersion – these inevitably become less frequent experiences for those who live increasingly in front of screens. Electronic media change our psychic metabolism. I know that well-designed social-scientific studies haven’t yet established this to everyone’s satisfaction. But really, wouldn’t it be astonishing if they didn’t have that effect?

An interview with George Scialabba http://thenewinquiry.com/features/an-interview-with-george-scialabba/#more-11318

"Look at your fish." http://robinsloan.com/fish Brilliant.

You see, I'm leaving Google, in toto -- meaning in every single possible personal way. What you're reading is the first seven days in the attempt, which is ongoing.

If you live in the modern world, leaving Google is both heresy and damn difficult to do. My primary motivation is that I don't believe Google's privacy protection claims. But you should know I cannot know the truth of its claims; I simply don't trust them. I was raised to be skeptical.

The scientist who is trying to find and capture nature’s soft voice before human sounds completely drown it out.

Last March, a group of ecologists and engineers taking advantage of advances in collecting, storing and analyzing vast quantities of digital data declared a new field of science: soundscape ecology. Other disciplines have long observed how various sounds affect people and individual animal species, but no one, they argued in the journal Bioscience, has yet studied the interconnected sounds of whole ecosystems. Soundscapes — composed of biological utterances like birdcalls, geophysical commotions like wind and running water and anthropogenic noises like motors — are “an acoustic reflection of the patterns and processes of the landscape,” the paper’s lead author, Bryan Pijanowski, an ecologist at Purdue University, told me. “And if we can take sound samples and develop appropriate metrics, we might be able to say, ‘Hey, this is a healthy landscape and this is an unhealthy landscape.’ ”

The simple experiment of holding one's hands parallel and then gradually bringing them together until there is some sort of 'feeling' may come to function for our time as Galileo's telescope did for his. Where it will all take us is a story yet to be written; I hope to see it and to play my part.

Jerry Ravetz, philosopher at large who dreamed up the "post normal science" movement

Caught this in late Feb NTEN web newsletter and couldn't resist.

Slow Planet is a nice starting place and clearinghouse for many a Slow movement

"It doesn't matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student."

[he's speaking at POD this year, yay!]

SumOfUs has started a petition to ask Apple to demand better labor practices from its suppliers before the iPhone 5 comes out.

This American Life Jan 2012

Mike Daisey was a self-described "worshipper in the cult of Mac." Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

I liked this quote from Daisy on adapting the piece for TAL and then listening to it in his apartment.

It is a strange thing to go from being the speaker to the listener, and to hear your voice come back to you, like a visitor from another country, with a story you have told yourself night after night for years.

It reminds me of responses people have to a speaker-listener/understander model of communication we have been experimenting with where the speaker talks to someone whose job is only to listen, no interruptions or interjections. The listener's task is then to recount what they heard but in the frame of understanding, so that that the speaker hears themself through the filter of the listener.

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