Levy has written extensively on the subject including Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
. David M Levy, in a longer discussion of the topic gives a Google Talk (58 minutes) entitled “No Time to Think” http://youtu.be/KHGcvj3JiGA which expands upon this notion of being too busy, saturated, and distracted. One of the articles he brings up is Vannevar Bush's seminal work "As We May Think" Atlantic Monthly (July 1945) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ In this article, Bush introduces the concept of hypertext, inter connection and speeding up thought. If you haven't read the article already, take the time to work through it and be amazed.Information Overload is one of the overarching issues that prevents our taking the time to think, contemplate, and understand, to find quiet time to work. Ann Blair also writes about information overload in her 2011 book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
This is certainly an issue all of us deal with as we attempt to master a subject. But in order to understand a subject, you must take the time to slow down, draw connections, synthesize, and think. One way to take the time to slow down is to practice 'serial mono-tasking.' Mono-tasking is doing one thing at a time, not jumping from thing to thing, topic to topic, following those maddening links while texting, talking, and watching YouTube. By the way, Neil Postman writes about the issue of technology and how it dominates our lives in his 1993 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
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If you are fascinated by this topic, you should check out this wonderful blog post by May 4, 2011 "Complexity, Computing, Contemplation, Learning?" (May 4, 2011)
http://learningemergence.net/tag/contemplative-mind/
Take the time to slow down, relax, think, and engage with all of what you want to learn today.
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