CHAPTER 5

LUDDITES BEWARE

ATTENTION TECHNOLOGIES

When it comes to information technology, most organizations have taken a hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you approach. Just as alcohol consumption causes hangovers, the widespread use of technology certainly contributes to the information glut and resulting attention deficit. The question is, can technology cure an information hangover and help solve the problem it helped create? We think so, although the cure must go far beyond the “intelligent agents” that have been discussed—but not made useful—for decades.

In this section we’ll describe three different types of attention technologies: attention-getting, attention-structuring, and attention-protecting technologies. For the most part, we’ll describe ...

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