I can't resist this piece [pointer from Andy Lark] that argues CNN.com - E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot':

[from CNN.com]

Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.

The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.

Hmmm. This is another Taylorist argument against Continuous Partial Attention, which most think of as a disorder. However, CPA is a reasonable strategy for dealing with a sped-up world, but it requires shifting the measurement of productivity away from the individual -- like 'IQ' tests -- and looking at the productivity of connected groups. Time in today's world is yet another shared space: your time is truly not your own. We constantly monitor communications -- email, IMs, blogs -- to keep ourself situationally aware of what is going on around us.

The shift in focus is profound: you need to accept interrupts from others so that they can make progress on their activities, even though this decreases your personal productivity. But it increases the productivity of your contacts, and those dependent on their activities, and so on. It's a form of social altruism.

But the clowns with the stop watches want us to focus, focus, focus to the exclusion of these basic human motives. "Don't help your buddy with his stupid coding problem! Screw him! Get back to making widgets."

And I love the way they suggest that remaining socially connected is a drug that taps your intelligence. So those of us who advocate living connected lives are just a bunch of hippies, I guess. "Tune in, Turn on, Drop out" - Timothy Leary