Death Metal Rooster
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Web, video
The posting of this probably brings down the tone of my blog (if there is one at all), but I can’t help but like some of the stupid things you can find online. I found this via one of my favourite podcasts diggnation.
Tags: Culture, Diggnation, Heavy Metal, Internet, Podcast, Rooster, video
Distractions = Creative Productivity?
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under News, Technology, opinion
For me, this Monday didn’t turn out to be the productive day I wanted it to be, due to various electronic distractions, but despite this I don’t believe that social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, amongst other various Internet delights, are in fact leading us to be less productive.
On Sky News last Sunday, they reported that a study from the University of Northampton suggests that people are becoming addicted to there gadgets.
The scenarios they give are worryingly familiar.
Interrupted from our primary task by a pop-up alerting us to an email, we stop what we are doing to read the email.
That then directs us elsewhere, perhaps to another link on the internet.
We may then check other emails stacked up behind the new one. A quick look on Facebook, Twitter or something else, and it may be half an hour before we’re back to that primary task.
“You can not any more do effectively the task you were originally doing, even if it was routine,” Professor Kakabadse said.
“You will suddenly feel low energy, you become clumsy and you have a spatial disorder. You become exhausted,” she said. (Sky News)
This sort of reporting regarding technology hardly new, neigh it is expected, take for example the scares around televisions. In relation to this story, which is nothing special; it seems to have only got coverage due to the PR department at the University of Northampton, I would suggest that you can find addiction in almost anything from cheese to stamp collecting from computer gaming to knitting.
It is of my opinion, and partly that of Russel M Davies from Wired magazine UK, that distraction may infact aid productivity. We were not designed to work solely on one task, as Davies points out, “we’re easily distracted creatures, evolved to be continually scanning for new stimuli…” I personally find that when doing creative work. i.e. not reading, it is much easier to do it with the occasional look at YouTube, the occasional bit of tweeting on twitter and the occasional stumble on stumble-upon. This personal affirmation seems to be proved plausible by a study pointed out by Davies who states that:
A study from the universities of Harvard and Toronto suggests that people with reduced latent inhibition are more likely to have original thoughts than the rest of us. Latent inhibition is “the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant”. I think this means that imaginative people are worse at screening out the world than you and me. Or better at being distracted. So maybe we mortals can increase our originality by deliberately and purposefully using distracting and unfocused tools. (Wired Magazine UK)
I must now end this blog post and get some work done, well, I’m going to have a quick look at facebook first, naturally.
Tags: Evolution, Facebook, Internet, News, Productivity, Reporting, Social networks, Study, Stumble Upon, Technology, Twitter, University, Web 2.0, work, youtube
Redundant Data.
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Book, University, opinion
Earlier this week I had a Digital Media lecture about Social Networking sites, and there was a breif discussion about the differences between Myspace and Facebook. After the lecture I started thinking about my web habits and have decided to delete all the accounts that I no longer use (That is if i can even remember them at all)
One of the arguments raised in the class was that the proliferation of social networking sites, and in my opinion websites that require any personal data to be used effectively, are simply conditioning us to be more open to a surveillance orwellian-esq society. I can’t help but agree somewhat with this, it’s now just accepted that if we want to view a web-page we are going to have to provide personal data and make an account, (In fact this reminds me of The Gift by the sociologist Marcel Mauss) There was of course a time when this was in fact a rarity.
I was always of the opinion that I’d might as-well keep my online accounts open (such as myspace) just in case I might use them again, but in all honestly I most probably wont. I’d rather remove my data and only have it in places that I regularly use so I can try and keep more effective control of it, this ultimately is futile, but nevertheless knowing where data on me has been obtained in itself is useful.
I’ve so far successfully applied to have my myspace account deleted, it seems there is a 48 hour cooling off period before it is removed, I’m half expecting a torrent of e-mails from them trying to stop me from deleting it, in fact during the process of applying it kept saying things like “why don’t you add more friends?”, which I actually found quite insulting!
I’m going to, over the next few days, start deleting more accounts and updating information on others, hopefully it wont distract me too much from doing some much needed reading. I finish this post on a delightful image i found using a social network I do not intend to delete, stumbleupon.com
Note: I will make the image background transparent later, cannot be bothered to fire up photoshop at the moment.
Tags: Data, Digital, Facebook, Internet, Media, Myspace, Sociology
