In these days of RSS where you're a nobody unless you've "consumed" 200 feeds by lunchtime you can feel guilty if you 'waste' a couple of hours studying source material rather than just scanning the abstract and moving straight onto the next thing.
It's true that there have always been people calling attention to the damaging effects of speed. But it seems to me that we've reached a kind of breaking point now, that things have gotten so fast that they're taking such a toll on not only our health but our ability to enjoy things. It seems to me that we're so hurried and so hectic that we've almost lost the art of just being in the moment and taking real pleasure from things. We're so busy trying to get things finished so we can keep multitasking. We're kind of just whizzing through our lives instead of living them.
And now, if you go across the industrial world, you'll really find a very strong groundswell against that. People are slowing down in all walks of life. I've been traveling around and writing about it and hearing back from people, and there's a real sense of a slow movement in its early stages and [it's now] reaching critical mass.In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré | .com | .uk | .fr | .de
As I have got an hour or two free in the early hours of the morning I have decided to spend that time catching up the excellent Stanford online HCI seminars that are each about 90 minutes long.
The new season of seminars started yesterday and I have just finished watching the first one by Amy Jo Kim titled 'The Network is the Game: Social Trends in Mobile Entertainment'.
I would like to thank Terry Winograd for making these excellent seminars available to all of us.
Why don't you put the RSS aggregator aside for one day and watch a person talking about their passions instead?
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