#Beleave – Did social media win it for the Leave campaign?
I’ve suspended the series of posts on how technology hijacks our minds for this week, to focus on the Leave win in the UK’s EU referendum. I want to ask whether the Leave campaign won the social media battle and therefore the referendum war. Leave won on Facebook The New York Times has an interesting […]
The dynamic at the heart of information overload
This is the fourth part in a series on how technology “hijacks our minds” (to quote Google’s Tristan Harris). You can read part one of the series here. The last three blogs have looked at: How dopamine acts on our brains every time we get a Facebook like or an email update the same way […]
How to stay focused by stopping self-interruptions
This is the third part in a series on how technology “hijacks our minds” (to quote Google’s Tristan Harris). You can read part one of the series here. The last two blog posts have focused on how technology can distract and interrupt us. We’ve looked at two key mechanisms: The strong reinforcing effects from social media […]
We live in an “ecosystem of interruption technologies”
This is the second part in a series on how technology “hijacks our minds” (to quote Google’s Tristan Harris). You can read part one of the series here. Nicholas Carr, in his fantastic 2010 book The Shallows, describes turning on a computer today as plunging into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” (p91). Today’s co