Google, Meditation, and Tagging?

Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupider?" was read while attempting to hold a conversation on the phone, but that was abandoned after I realized that I didn't really care what my friend was talking about and that I had better focus on what I was reading if I was going to make any sense of it. And lo and behold, it was about losing the ability to pay attention! I'm not sure how much surfing the web or doing research through a computer has affected my concentration - I would blame that more on the years spent on the sofa watching TV. But even though I may not personally be able to relate, I do think that something is changing in the way our minds make connections. Ever see those commercials about "information overload"? People do seem to know some stuff about a lot of things, but not really a whole lot about a few things, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with Google, the Internet, or surfing - just an observation, and kind of a confession (do I fit into this category?). It seems to me that we're connecting information in a more web-like structure, but then again maybe the terminology is what is affecting us. Before the "web" would I ever have just made the statement I just did. Maybe our minds are working much in the same way they always have but the way that we describe it is different.

Next Article - Anderson's "In Defense of Distraction" - somewhat linked to the previous article, this dealt with how people are more distracted, their methods of focusing, multitasking, etc. I liked his example of trying to focus on a dot, and see how long you can focus on a single thing. Even though he spent a half an hour staring at it, it's not like he was focusing on it the whole time. A mind begins to wande;, noticing aspects of the dot you may have never realized before. Also, the realization that meditation is a "state of focused distraction" was a somewhat new concept to me. So that's how they do it! No need to focus on just one thing, a myriad will do, as long as you're focusing.

The first article, by Clay Shirky, was a bit hard for me to grasp. I'm not all that web-literate, and all the talk about tagging, especially towards the end, felt a little above my head. Although I did enjoy being enlightened as to the differences between the way Yahoo and Google make connections and establish hierarchies between categories. I guess the graphs helped with that part... Overall, the website showed that categorization is meaningless, that various things fall into many categories, and an attempt to label one thing as belonging to a particular category negates it's participation within other categories.