While the latest information technologies have made it possible for us to communicate with one another and to gain access to information more quickly than ever before, it is now clear that these powerful capabilities are also contributing to information overload, extreme busyness, and the fragmentation of attention, as well as to accelerated and even frantic modes of working and living. One of the most unfortunate consequences of this trend is the loss of time for reflection and contemplation?the loss of time to think. This is funding to partially support a workshop of about 100 participants that will be held June 16-17 on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, to explore this phenomenon across a number of significant cultural institutions, and to suggest possible responses and remedies. Professionals from a number of walks of life will be invited to participate and to address questions such as: How does the lack of time to think affect you in your work? How is it affecting your business, institution, or enterprise? What do you see as potential larger or long-term consequences to you, to your work, and to the larger society? Are you (or is your business, institution, or enterprise) aware of the situation? What positive steps are you taking to ameliorate it? What further steps might / should be taken? This 2-day event will begin the evening of Monday, June 16 with a panel of speakers drawn from various professions and walks of life. It will continue on Tuesday, June 17 with breakout groups that will allow all attendees to speak professionally and personally about the effects of the loss of time to think. The breakout groups will be followed by several parallel-track workshops that will examine the problem and/or potential solutions from a variety of perspectives. Finally, a closing plenary session will discuss possible concrete next steps. Participants will be selected from two main groups: people representing a number of major professions and walks of life whose work is negatively affected by the loss of time to think (e.g., lawyers, judges, physicians, nurses, health care administrators, print and broadcast journalists, K-12 teachers and school administrators, university faculty and administrators, corporate leaders and middle managers, high-tech workers, government employees, religious leaders of various faiths, artists, and homemakers), and researchers from a number of disciplines whose scholarship is relevant to the problem of the loss of time to think (e.g., computer and information science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history of technology, neuroscience, and medicine). This workshop constitutes a follow-on to the Workshop on Information, Silence, and Sanctuary which was held in Seattle in May of 2004, and the Workshop on Mindful Work and Technology which was held in Washington DC in March of 2006, both of which were organized by the PI with partial funding provided by NSF. As with the previous two events in the series, additional funding for the current workshop is expected to come from the MacArthur Foundation.
Broader Impacts: The PI's goal is to raise public awareness of the workshop topics and to stimulate broad discussion of them. To these ends, audio and videotape recordings of the opening panel, as well as a summary videotape regarding the workshop and a written report, will be made available to the public on the workshop website. The PI also plans to approach the local NPR affiliate in Seattle (KUOW) to interest them in broadcasting the opening panel discussion, as they did for the May 2004 workshop.
