Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

• There is a new state of the self, itself
• Are we losing the time to take our time?
• The tethered adolescent
• Virtuality and its discontents
• Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).

Consciousness and attention: not invariably linked

From Science Daily:

University College London researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.

...

Dr Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: ... "This is exciting research for the scientific community because it challenges previous thinking -- that what is subconscious is also automatic, effortless and unaffected by attention. This research shows that when your brain doesn't have the capacity to pay attention to an image, even images that act on our subconscious simply do not get registered."

The research challenges the theory of the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher, William James, (1842--1910), who said: "We are conscious of what we attend to -- and not conscious of what we do not attend to".

The team's findings show that there are situations where consciousness and attention don't go hand in hand.

So we can be busy identifying the world around us, by paying active attention to it, and yet not be conscious of that process. Interesting.