Good overview of “absent presence” and other afflictions of modern technology, found via LMG:

For years, researchers have discussed how cell phones have trampled over the once communal public space of sidewalks and restaurants. The idea is that we may be physically on a street corner, but our distracted minds are not. We do little bits of everything and none well.

A convergence of technologies is making the distractions still worse. A new kind of personal computer called the Media Center allows users to easily watch TV on the same screen where they swap instant messages and burn music DVDs. And Asian cell-phone companies have begun building television tuners into their most advanced models.

How we manage these relationships between technology and people is a growing source of anxiety. It’s depressing, but somehow fitting, that convergence now allows us to be distracted from our distractions.

The article goes onto cover methods of rationing information, such as “email-free days” in organisations. In fact most of the suggestions mentioned for managing the relationships between technology and people are seen as ‘on or off’ decisions… or at their most sophisticated: ‘throttling’ the amount.

There’s no mention of changing the information into meaning through good design (see the Bruce Sterling quote I posted earlier about “what to pay attention to”) – information can be made sense of, and the burden on our attention made less by great information design, information architecture, interaction design, user-interface design.

I think it’s fantastic that journalists, bloggers, technologists and hackers are starting to pay more attention to sociologists, ethnographers and other theorists on the human condition and technology’s effects. However, research and analysis takes you only so far – synthesis means design. It would be a shame if designers couldn’t benefit from this recent, reinvigorated dialogue, as I think the other parties would definitely benefit by including them.

Great design internalises the observed human needs, and instinctively creates useful, beautiful things.

Great design creates meaning from information.

I guess however Foucault’s Pendulum demonstrates we could always end up with “meaning overload”…

» TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press: “Attention Please!”

A snatch of Vonnegut found in the comments at Many2Many:

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

» HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.