My Robotic Hands.

My future companions?… Social Machines! Seems like I’ve been mechanized.

The introduction of social media has revolutionized my life. Instead of the conventional way of meeting up to keep in contact, the social media has provided us an avenue to stay in touch. Such efficiency enables us to stay in touch with more people effectively, even though we may be living on different borders of the world. It kinda bridges the gap.  Since then, I’ve been spending a whole lot of my time in front of the computer facebooking, twittering and blogging.

Alternatively, I can spend my time snail mailing and meeting up friends for coffee or tea, which in my opinion, adds a personal touch to relationships. But most of the time, we don’t have the luxury of time. Therefore, we have created a virtual world through social networking.

But how has social machines been detrimental to us?

Yup. And this is what I learned in tutorial. Its called continuous partial attention. Given that we have the liberty to used our handphones, computers and other electronic gadgets in school, we are often distracted in lectures. While taking in the lecture, we are reading through our friend’s tweets and updating facebook status. Can we really absorb 100% of all that is going on around us? 

Richard Kadrey quoted from Social technologist Linda Stone in an article about continuous partial attention.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/continuous-partial-empathy

It mentions that though we may pay ongoing attention to several inputs, we can only provide limited degrees of attention to each. Her strategy to overcome is to manage our attention well. We pay more attention to what is needed. More about the difference of continuous partial attention and multi-tasking is made known in the below link.

http://www.lindastone.net/

The next point I am going to make, we are all under the influence of continuous computing.

1) Gadgets that allows us to access internet are so cheap.

2) Internet access is so readily available.

3) The information we can source from the net is so vast.

There is no stop to this revolution.  I am already partially mechanized!

And throughout vast information on the internet we can pull from, we have google reader and other bookmarking websites such as delicious.com to help us sort through the clutter. How convenient…

Like what was mentioned in class, social media serves as a mean to enhance communication. Now that it has been infused into our lives, I can’t imagine living a day without my social machines.

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~ by Marcus on November 10, 2009.