Ep 76. Maggie Jackson: The Erosion of Attention
"We need rebels of slow and rebels of attention."
Maggie Jackson
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and former Boston Globe columnist known for her penetrating coverage of social issues, especially technology’s impact on humanity. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications worldwide, including the The New York Times, Business Week, Utne, and on National Public Radio. Her first book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge. One of her most popular books is Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention which has been compared by Fast Company magazine to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring for its prophetic warnings of our global crisis in distraction. A fully updated edition with a new preface by the author will be published in September 2018.
Stew and Maggie discuss these costs and their consequences. Maggie believes this fragmentation is such a destructive force that there is a coming dark age, an age where the quality of communication drops dramatically. One of the best ways to prevent this dark age is to simply talk about our technology usage with family members and coworkers, then takes steps to create workable boundaries, to allow for undistracted time. Maggie explores other solutions too in this engaging conversation. You can find a transcript here.
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