The Vancouver Sun is publishing a series of articles called “20 Big Ideas” about the trends and phenomena that defined this decade.
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Part 2: Technologies are enticing, but it is harder and harder to wean ourselves away from them.

When I e-mailed Gloria Mark to ask if she would be available for an interview, I wasn’t expecting a quick response.

That’s because I knew that as a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress and other studies on multi-tasking, she set a schedule to avoid digital distractions by checking her e-mail only twice a day.

That makes her a bit of an anomaly in a relentlessly wired and wireless world, which is starting to weary some to the point that uni-tasking or mono-tasking could come as a welcome relief.

“I can only guess that multi-tasking has increased over the decade because we’ve got a lot more devices and applications available to us,” said Mark. “For example Twitter — it wasn’t around 10 years ago and now it is one of the top applications being used on the Web.

“We’ve got a lot more technologies available that people seem to enjoy, like Twitter, Facebook and social networking sites that didn’t exist 10 years ago. There is a lot more to offer people but at the same time, it is distracting.”

Read this article from The Vancouver Sun.

“I’m always a little amazed at the artists who only sell at street fairs, or even who make street fairs their main priority. Perhaps it’s too easy. It’s easy to cart your work down the street, put it on display and hope someone who’s walking by buys it.

It’s certainly easier than learning how to set up a well thought out Web site. It’s easier than learning how to set that site up take payments, have effective SEO, and properly display your images. I met so many amazing artists last night, including CJ Randall, who I bought the print at the top of this post from. Unfortunately most of them had sites that were out of date, poorly constructed, or not set up to take payments.”

Read this article from The Abundant Artist.