Two short remarks.<br><br>One on blanking out. I believe this phenomena is not new. In my case, I've had it as a kid, when walking (I would inexplicably arrive at my destination, without recall of how I got there), and later, as an adult in the car (this is of course more scary, but I never had an accident).
<br><br>I actually wonder if it is not a mild form of epilepsy.<br><br>Information overload, I think the term is useful precisely because of its negative connotation, and CPA have a danger which we could call a narrowing of consciousness. In highly stressfull environments, which is most of our corporate environments today, the overload and multitude of to do's lead to a focus on the immediate future, and a loss of thoughtfullness and awareness of the past and future. This is a real pathology in our culture, and reinforces the tendency of not caring about the long-term effects of our actions.
<br><br>It's actually one of the main reasons I decided to quit the corporate world, and live here in Thailand, as a 'refugee of Western civilization', and I must say I successfully recovered that sense of the long now, because of the slower pace of life. It is important, for individuals and for our culture, to recover a richer sense of mulitple time and temporal experiences (the rich now of tribal cultures, the cyclical time of agricultural civilizations, the linear and spatialized time of the industrial West ,the timeless witness stand of meditative psycho-technologies, etc...). Positively interpreted, CPA is an achievement of the informational era, and it is fine, as long as it doesn't destroy the other and older capabilities, one of which is the capacity for 'slow, focused' intake.
<br><br>Yes, speed reading is useful in some circumstances, but it is nowhere as 'digestively' rich as a slow reading process allowing ample time for reflection and meditation.<br><br>My conclusion is not that one is better than the other, but that a full human being needs the inner capacity to switch to the most appropriate temporal skill, according to circumstances.
<br><br>Michel Bauwens<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/31/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Andreas Schiffler</b> <<a href="mailto:aschiffler@ferzkopp.net">aschiffler@ferzkopp.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>> There is a new psychological phenomenon emerging in this era of hyper-<br>> telemedia, information abundance and overload. People of all ages and<br>> walks of life are 'blanking'_______that is, they are shutting down or
<br>> experiencing momentary ruptures of consciousness, or in very severe cases,<br>> 'blanking' sometimes lasting for days.<br><br>While I don't agree on the negatively-charged term "overload", there is
<br>certainly an abundance of input these days. I'd warn though to connect<br>this solely to the latest developments: Internet, Hypermedia, Web2.0,<br>etc.. These are really just elements of a general trend for "enriching"
<br>our environment, making things nice, designed, pretty, active,<br>experiential, available, etc which has been going on for centuries.. As<br>Wolfgang Welsch call it: we are living as "Homo aestheticus" these days.
<br>And since information is an ingredient for some people (not all of<br>course) in this enrichment process, information technology plays a major<br>role when we are "aestheticising through information".<br><br>
Physiologically, the effect of "blanking" makes good sense though. It is<br>probably comparable to the tinnitus after attending an ultra-loud rock<br>concert, just at a higher level of sensory processing. Maybe it can
<br>compare better to the silence in the car with your friends, after an<br>overloading entertainment experience of a night out (ok, ok that might<br>be caused by the drugs or the beer as well). To make it a treatable<br>
problem sound's fishy to me ... just like ADHD is probably a big problem<br>for some kids, the scope of the public treatment with pharmaceuticals is<br>likely "manufactured" by the drug companies for economic purposes.
<br><br>Personally, I don't blank. At least I don't recall it - which is maybe a<br>function of the cause: it is supposed to be a loss of consciousness,<br>isn't it. Maybe the real problem is that we are becoming aware of such
<br>blanking periods more often. Sorta like dreams: we all dream at night<br>(scientists claim) but we don't experience these dreams necessarily.<br>They disappear again into the windings of the cortex. I, for example,
<br>remember dreams extremely rarely. Usually only when I have a cold with<br>fever spells (and bad sleep patterns). I guess my "non-blanking" has to<br>do with a general sensibility to avoid such overload. A feature people
<br>likely develop when growing older. If I would do my programming with<br>loud music, "spaghetti code" would surely be the result.<br><br>Happy New Year (... whaaat not '06, its already '07 ... s**t, must have
<br>blanked for a whole year. :-)<br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (<a href="http://distributedcreativity.org">distributedcreativity.org
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http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a><br><br><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.<br><br>Wiki and Encyclopedia, at <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net">
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