Book

The Distraction Addiction

Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Little, Brown US, 2013

Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle

1×

Melden Sie sich an, um die Audiozusammenfassung anzuhören.

Editorial Rating

Qualities

Innovative
Applicable

Recommendation

Buddhists use the phrase “monkey mind” to describe a person’s easily distracted consciousness. Information technology – a phrase that futurist, consultant and professor Alex Soojung-Kim Pang uses to encompass computers, mobile devices, and the cornucopia of data and entertainment that the web offers – makes it difficult for you to focus. Pang addresses pressing concerns for individuals and societies regarding technology, warning that the Internet can recede into the background, to become the water in which you swim, even as it shapes human interaction. Instead, he says, remain mindful of how you use technology; choose what you want to do without letting its demands dominate you. Pang explains how to adopt a contemplative attitude while utilizing technology, and offers reasons and permission to simply turn it off. getAbstract recommends this exploration to thoughtful readers who use basic computing technology and to those long since immersed in the data ocean.

Summary

“Distractions”

Technology encourages distractions that fragment human attention. “Americans spend an average of 60 hours a month online or 720 hours a year.” That is three months of workdays, “90 eight-hour days per year.” People spend 20 days social networking, 32 days on email and 38 days on content, split among the news, blogs and YouTube. “If maintaining your online life feels like a job, maybe that’s because it is.”

Your smartphone, your job and the Internet make excess demands on your time and attention and leave you harried. You jump from one task to another, often not remembering what you did last. This did not originate with the web; human beings have complained about distractions since civilization began. Buddhists have long employed the metaphor of the “monkey mind” to represent unfocused human thinking because monkeys constantly seek stimulation, and “the monkey mind is crazy.” The late Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa taught that it “leaps about and never stays in one place. It is completely restless.”

Idoya, a rhesus monkey at a neuroscience laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and macaques at the Iwatayama Monkey Park...

About the Author

Consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a futurist at Strategic Business Insights, is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

Comment on this summary or Diskussion beginnen

Sign in to share your opinion
A. 1 decade ago

I think many of us are guilty of switch-tasking when we believe we are multi-tasking. Great summary!

The Distraction Addiction

Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul

Read or listen offline

Editorial Rating

Qualities

Recommendation

Summary

“Distractions”

About the Author

My Highlights

Comment on this summary or Diskussion beginnen

More on this topic

By the same author

Learners who read this summary also read

Related Channels