Wow, two great tech-oriented manifestos have been published pretty much back-to-back: David Shields’ Reality Hunger and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. These two reviews of the books are more eloquent than I could muster.

(Speaking of books, I highly recommend the gossipy and addictive Game Change, an insider account of the ’08 election campaigns.  I’m now digging into Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.)

My life has changed much more than I thought it would. My mind is more peaceful, I have a more nutritious media diet and my body appreciates spending less time hunched in front of a laptop. We’ll see if I slip back into old habits, but for the foreseeable future my medium of choice is words on paper.

Alright, that’s it’s for that topic for a while. I’m currently finishing a little paid video gig and working on a reinvention of the Goodie Bag style. Stay tuned for more on these.

I’ve been working a lot for a couple weeks now. In many ways that’s made this challenge easier – I have little free time to kill — but I also have little energy left for anything but the most passive diversions. During these periods of end-of-the-day exhaustion, I started watching Philip Bloom’s video training and episodes of Mac Break Studio. I considered these fair game because they’re research for work I’m doing. But I soon found myself zoning out to the the Mac Break episodes, checking out a few other sorta related videos, and then watching an episode of a (very good) Monty Python documentary series. I got into that, thought ‘fuck it’ and watched all six episodes.

During alone times last week I often found one trivial interior dialogue would lead hyperlink-style to another and another and another. My mind was the most chaotic it’s been in quite some time and I don’t think watching videos before dozing off caused this.

Despite my lapses, I didn’t exactly go on a fast media binge. I didn’t touch my RSS feeds, emailing was minimal and I only did a little web surfing when research went astray. I think I’ve learned my problems with focus and neurotic thought cycles aren’t just the result of my immoderate fondness of fast media. I’ll explore this more in the next update.

In other news, I did an interview with the BBC about this project. My thanks to Jamilah Knowles.

Things I’m Reading

Good’s Slow Issue

The Attention Revolution, B. Alan Wallace

Early observation: the days are seeming longer and more productive.

Things I’m Reading
The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
The Economist

Things I’m Listening to
RadioLab
AV Club Talk