{"id":784,"date":"2009-03-16T09:35:10","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T08:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=784"},"modified":"2009-04-19T17:13:43","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T16:13:43","slug":"technology-and-mental-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2009\/03\/16\/technology-and-mental-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology and mental states"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tanya Gold <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/lifeandstyle\/2009\/mar\/12\/tanya-gold-technology\">gave up computers and mobile phones for a week<\/a>. She reports &#8216;Life seemed slower, and slightly more rewarding&#8217;.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i><br \/>\nThese electronic toys are skilled at making you believe you are achieving things &#8211; working or interacting with those strange things I think are called other people. They give you the illusion of occupation and purpose. But it is false. You do nothing. You fritter and buzz and beep and shout &#8220;I&#8217;m in Swindon!&#8221;, all the way to the grave.<br \/>\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But she picked back up her mobile phone, and logged back on to facebook I&#8217;m sure. Maybe, like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/lifeandstyle\/2009\/mar\/07\/stress-health-wellbeing-psychology\">Oliver Burkeman<\/a> says, we like feeling busy and the self-importance (and distraction) that it brings.<\/p>\n<p>I also like being busy, and without a certain amount of freneticism I don&#8217;t get as much done. But I also like the mental breathing space of not having a mobile phone, or not feeling like I need to check my email. I think technology can make us smarter and happier, and if people constantly twitter or check their email or whatever I think it is probably because they like things like that. But there is a trade-off, a state of mind that is lost when you adopt the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lindastone.net\/\">continuous partial attention<\/a> mode. The conundrum is how to get the benefits of energy withouty the costs of loss-of-focus (or, from the other perspective, how to keep the benefits of calm  while still being in touch and efficient). Answers on a postcard please&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tanya Gold gave up computers and mobile phones for a week. She reports &#8216;Life seemed slower, and slightly more rewarding&#8217;. These electronic toys are skilled at making you believe you are achieving things &#8211; working or interacting with those strange things I think are called other people. They give you the illusion of occupation and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-cE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}