No Time to Think

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Google Tech Talks
March, 5 2008

ABSTRACT

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

Speaker: David M. Levy
David Levy earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1979 and a Diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute (London) in 1983. For more than fifteen years he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where his work, described in "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (Arcade, 2001), centered on exploring the transition from paper and print to digital. During the year 2005-2006, he was the holder of the Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress. A professor at the UW Information School since 2000-2001, he has been investigating how to restore contemplative balance to a world marked by information overload, fragmented attention, extreme busyness, and the acceleration of everyday life.

Channel: People & Blogs
Uploaded: March 7, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Author: googletechtalks

Length: 00:58:08
Rating: 4.82
Views: 39003

Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education

Video Comments:
freddiecox (November 4, 2008 at 9:55 pm)
Great talk. I have really enjoyed all of these Google Tech Talks. I feel this talks goes well with David Allen's and Merlin Mann's Getting Things Done philosophy to clear the runway so that we can get back to thinking at 40,000 ft.
JoelHough (September 28, 2008 at 11:04 am)
I believe Christopher Alexander hit on the qualities of contemplative spaces in his pattern language books. I highly recommended them.

Great talk. Thanks to Dr. Levy and Google.
ryanisle (September 2, 2008 at 9:10 pm)
I quite liked the lack of laughing following the 'book-binding' joke.

All in all a good talk though, if a little long-winded.
Metophile (September 1, 2008 at 4:03 am)
Nice Talk.

I think the answer he keeps seeming to look for is at least partially found in the act of creating, blogging, commenting and all the other aspects of content creation that exist and support the model he mentions a lot, information retrieval and sorting, which he also mentions, google supplies so well.
Winsucker (September 1, 2008 at 2:35 am)
Tnx for that talk.
johnsharer (May 27, 2008 at 4:38 am)
I first met Dr. Levy in 1970, when we were suitemates at our undergraduate college. Dr. Levy is one of the most thoughtful and profund thinkers I had ever met. From this talk, it is apparent that Dr. Levy still amply deserves that distinction.
particulateman (March 22, 2008 at 4:52 am)
What if, the entire "problem" of information overload is not "work load" but rather our current wealth.

Today, we can choose to buy what was never available to individuals before. Two hundred years ago a successful person might need to labor or study for 14-16 hours a day to attain a life we would now consider poor.

Today, it's possible to be relatively successful with very little effort. We can use this spare time any way we wish, but most choose to remain "busy" rather than still.
particulateman (March 22, 2008 at 4:45 am)
There are several problems with this talk. One of his points was that "productivity decreases" because of our "information overload." However, every measure of productivity over the last 150 years (the time period he says that this has started) shows productivity increasing.
vgraupera (March 11, 2008 at 2:46 am)
Quite slow