Living in Many Nows

Present Shock speaks to the experience that people have when they are able to be connected to many different “trains of thought” at once.

Source: http://giphy.com/gifs/office-gif-us-powerpoint-gifs-94iS62lx8CRQA?twit_auth=1

When working at the office meant working at the office.

Vs.

Source: http://giphy.com/gifs/movie-iqsy348AiG1zO#

Last minute exercise because Google Calendar reminded you of your upcoming doctor’s appointment.

At 6:30 in the above video Rushkoff makes note of the idealistic vision of the internet that was floating around in its early days, but he quickly shifts gears and points out some of the downfalls of having an ever-present internet connection.

• Constant interruption
• Requiring immediate attention
• Response quality fell because people had to quickly address whatever came up instead of taking their time to really think about a response.\

I polled ten people, and asked them how they would generally act upon receiving a text message.

Clearly, the majority of the people in this poll regularly answer texts immediately.

So I asked them to describe the urgency of those texts.

Averaging the six poll participants’ answers, the graph describes their text activity within one day.

They seem to apply the same sort of attention to emergency situations as they do to unimportant texts that don’t really warrant immediate attention.

I couldn’t appear in the video. I was too busy on my phone.

So in this video I ask Douglass his opinion on those findings.