Technology and Distraction

Reading time: < 1 minutes

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, discusses at TED the interplay between technology, attention, and distraction.

For additional discussion of this TED talk, see Alexandra Dempsey’s post on the Freedom blog.

For additional discussion the significance of focus, the importance of guarding it, and a helpful tool to that end, see Focus—there’s an app for that. For more information or to try Freedom, see the Freedom website. For additional similar discussion and tools, see also timewellspent.io.

TEDification How To

Reading time: < 1 minutes

TED curator Chris Anderson has an article in Harvard Business Review (2013) that seeks to digest key presentation advice derived from the past several decades of TED’s work. Perhaps not all Anderson’s advice is appropriate to the genre of the academic conference paper, but doubtless a good many would substantially benefit from a healthy dose of some of the advice he offers.