by Nick Bilton
6 Wall Street Journal pricing: Bill Grueskin, “The case for Charging to Read WSJ.Com,” Reflections of a Newsosaur, March 22, 2009. http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/03/case-for-charging-to-read-wsjcom.html case-for-charging-to-read-wsjcom.html.
7 YouTube statistics and anecdotes: Public talk by Mike Wesch, a YouTube anthropologist, PopTech, Camden, Mass. 2009.
8 Psychologists debated the importance of “love”: Harry F Harlow, “The Nature of Love,” American Psychologist 13 (1958): 673–85.
9 Creating fake monkeys: Harry F Harlow. and Robert R. Zimmerman, “Affectional Responses in the Infant Monkey,” Science 130 no. 3373 (1959): 421–32.
10 The mobile phone becomes a “transitional object”: Rivka Ribak, “Remote Control, Umbilical Cord and Beyond: The Mobile Phone as a Transitional Object,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 27 (2009): 183–96.
11 In numerous interviews, university-based human/computer interaction specialists: BJ Fogg, phone interview, 2009. In person discussion, conference, FooCamp, Sabastapool, CA., 2009. Also phone interview with Dan Siewiorek, 2009.
Chapter 7: warning: danger zone ahead
1 Blindness: José Saramago, Harvest Books, 1995.
2 While operating a vehicle: Matt Richtel, “In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin,” New York Times, July 27, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/technology/28texting.html.
3 The cocktail party problem: E. Colin Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25 no. 5 (1953): 975–79.
4 As research progressed in this area, key experiments found: Broadbent is cited in Barry Arons, “A Review of the Cocktail Party Effect,” Journal of the American Voice I/O Society, July 12, 1992.
5 “Complete understanding … is still missing”: Simon Haykin and Zhe Chen, “The Cocktail Party Problem,” Neural Computation 17 (2005): 1875–902. Also: Interview with Kevin T. Hill, PhD candidate, Center for Mind and Brain, University of California–Davis.
6 The attentional blink: Jane E Raymond, Kimron L. Shapiro, and Karen M. Arnell, “Temporary Suppression of Visual Processing in an RSVP Task: An Attentional Blink?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 18 (1992): 849–60.
7 Two very simple tasks simultaneously: Paul E Dux, Jason Ivanoff, Christopher L. Asplund, et al., “Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI,” Neuron 52 (2006): 1109–120. Also: Online interview with Paul Dux, Queensland Attention & Control Lab, 2009 and phone interview with Dr. René Marois Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, 2009.
8 A very colorful and fun book about the brain: John Medina, Brain Rules, Seattle: Pear Press, 2008. Also personal interview with John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Bioengineering, and Seattle Pacific University, 2009
9 Multitasking pilots: Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer, and J. Evans, “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching,” Journal of Experimental Psychology (2001).
10 “Partial displacement theory”: Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Also personal interview Clifford Nass, Professor at Stanford University, 2009.
11 “Multitasking Generation”: Claudia Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation,” Time, March 19, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174696,00.html.
12 Study by the Kaiser Family Foundation: “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year-Olds,” Rep. no. 030905, Kaiser Family Foundation, March 9, 2005, http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm.
13 Maybe you’re just fooling yourself: Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” PNAS Early Edition (2009), www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903620106. Also phone interviews with Clifford Nass, sociologist and professor at Stanford University, 2009 and 2010.
14 Questions related to the experiences they engage in simultaneously: L. Mark Carrier, Nancy A. Cheever, Larry D. Rosen, et al., “Multitasking Across Generations: Multitasking Choices and Difficulty Ratings in Three Generations of Americans,” Computers in Human Behavior 25 (2009): 483–89. Also phone interviews with Mark Carrier and Nancy Cheever, 2009.
Chapter 8: what the future will look like
1 The Minority Report concepts: Personal interview with Dale Herigstad, creative director, Schematic. Also e-mail interview with Mr. Herigstad and video by John Underkoffler about the future of user interface for 2010 TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html. Also: Wikipedia entry for Minority Report, en.Wikipedia.org.
2 Test their viewing experiences on different kinds of screens: Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Matthew Lombard, Robert D. Reich, et al., “The Role of Screen Size in Viewer Experiences of Media Content,” Visual Communication Quarterly 6 no. 2 (1999): 4–9.
3 Mobile phones … used for teaching: Nipan Maniar, Emily Bennett, Steve Hand, et al., “The Effect of Mobile Phone Screen Size on Video Based Learning,” Journal of Software 3 no. 4 (2008): 51–61. Also e-mail interview, December 2009.
4 4.6 billion active mobile phones: CTIA-The Wireless Association.
5 Kindle: Josh Quittner, “Will Amazon’s Kindle Rescue Newspapers?” Time, May 5, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1895737,00.html.
6 Walter Lippmann and John Dewey: The debate played out largely in the pages of The New Republic, in a series of articles dating from 1922 to 1927. Also: In-person interview, Jay Rosen, NYU School of Journalism, 2009 and in-person interview with Mitchel Stephens, author of A History of News and The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, NYU School of Journalism, 2009.
7 Cyborgs: Gordon Bell and Steve Mann: Clive Thompson, “A Head for Detail,” Fast Company 110, November 1, 2006, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html. Also: Personal discussion with Gordon Bell, Toronto, 2008, and personal discussion with Steve Mann, Toronto, 2008.
about the author
NICK BILTON is the lead technology writer for the New York Times Bits blog and a reporter for the paper. He writes for the Times about the effects technology is having on our culture and society and the sweeping changes taking place to traditional businesses. His work weaves together many different fields of storytelling, including journalism, design, technology, user interface, documentary film, advertising, and hardware hacking and how these fields will shape the future. At the Times he has also worked in the research and development labs, peering ten years into the future of media and helping chart the path for the future of news. Bilton is also an adjunct professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunication program and speaks regularly around the world at major technology and publishing conferences and universities. He hopes to own a robot one day.