Oliver Burkeman has a really great piece in the Guardian about contemplative computing, or what he refers to as conscious computing.
Thanks to my genius of an agent, Oliver got a copy of my book a few weeks ago, and so I was able to connect with him, talk on the phone for about 45 minutes, and get a nice mention in the article:
Yes, the internet is "changing our brains", but then so does everything – and, contrary to the claims of one especially panicky Newsweek cover story, it certainly isn't "driving us mad".
Yet that gnawing sense of mind-atrophy that Carr identified hasn't gone away, and just recently in Silicon Valley it's stopped being taboo to admit it. "I would go into a room to get something, and by the time I got there I'd forget what I was looking for," says Alex Pang, a Stanford University technologist who'd barely turned 40 when he began to feel that life online was melting his brain. "For someone who had got through life on raw brainpower, this was unsustainable, and a little terrifying."
Carr, like any number of technology sceptics, would probably have advised Pang to take a break: to disconnect from the internet and head for the mountains; to declare a gadget-free "digital sabbath" one day a week; to get rid of his smartphone or never check email at night. But Pang is a techno-enthusiast, to put it mildly, so his instinctive first thought was the opposite. What if there were a way to use the internet – and all our web-connected phones and tablets and laptops and games consoles – to foster rather than erode our attention spans, and to replace that sense of edgy distractedness with calm?
This is the question motivating the embryonic movement known variously as "calming technology", "the slow web", "conscious computing" or (Pang's preferred term) "contemplative computing". Its members hope that we might be able to perform a sneaky bit of jujitsu on the devices that dominate our lives: to turn the agents of distraction into agents of serenity.
The article really hits all the high notes in my view, and I highly recommend it. You can also (if the widget is working) see what people are saying about the article on Twitter: