MAYA Design has created a thought provoking video that concisely explores the coming challenges of the pervasive computing era.

Researchers at Vanderbuilt University have conducted experiments which explore ways of filtering information.

Timothy Young, founder of Socialcast has written a thoughtful essay in which he compares information consumption habits to food consumption habits.

Grant McCracken wrote a salient blog post recently that discusses the difficulties of keeping up with all the information there is to keep up with. He voices the need for better “knowledge architecture” – new services that can discover, aggregate, filter and organize information in ways that are relevant, and make sense for individual users.
Grant talks about this need for better knowledge design:
The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.  I won’t pay anything for access to the New York Times.  This is an interesting aggregator, but it’s way too chunky [...]

Linda Stone at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo
Writer and consultant Linda Stone, who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention”, shares some thoughts on the effects of pervasive digital technology in a newly released Gel video (above).
Economist Justin Wehr has pulled out some salient quotes (from Via founder Dee Hock) that Stone uses in the presentation:
Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
Data becomes information when it’s assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
Information becomes knowledge when it’s integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
Knowledge becomes [...]

It’s become a truism that our interactions with technology are changing the way we think and act. But the big question is how exactly we’re being changed. Some say it’s evolving us into higher functioning humans, while others claim our hyper-multitasking and reliance on technology as an outboard brain is dumbing us way down.
Another missive from the negative camp has come around -Maggie Jackson, Author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, says that our ability to deeply focus and pay attention is being swept away by our “cybercentric” society.
She claims that attention is hard-wired into [...]

These days, designers are looking for ways to add tactile experience and analog physicality to devices that have become virtual and digital. Looking to create interfaces beyond flat touchscreens, they are embracing the clunky and perhaps flawed, but tangible aesthetic of the past.
The NVDRS Cassette Tape concept design utilizes this old-is-new mentality. It’s a digital music player, that uses limitations and physical movement to create a unique music listening experience. Keeping with the 45/60/90 minute limits of traditional cassette tapes, the NVDRS forces you to carefully select the songs you’d like to hear, and not just dump thousands upon thousands [...]

What’s the best way to sort, wade through and make sense of the oceans of digital media that’s stored on our hard drives? Inspired by musician Bill Drummond’s experiment of only listening to music starting with B for a year, Russell Davies is testing out the same filtering strategy on a compressed scale. In order to deeply engage with new music, and learn to pay attention in a new way, Davies is only listening to music starting with the same letter of the alphabet, one letter a week.
He explains:
I find that unless I trick myself into paying attention to music [...]