Guardian News: How life in the digital fast lane has made us lose touch with our senses

On 1st December 2013, The Guardian posted an article online in the News>Technology section as part of The Jemima Kiss Column series, titled: How life in the digital fast lane has made us lose touch with our senses.

Here are the key quotes:

"William Powers expressed a simple but astute observation about the impact of technology use on his behaviour in his book Hamlet's Blackberry. The digital consciousness, he wrote, can't tolerate three minutes of pure focus. "It had become hard for me to stay focused on a single task of any kind, mental or physical, without adding new ones. While brushing my teeth, I would wander out of the bathroom in search of something else to do at the same time. I'd be organising my sock drawer with one hand while trying to reach my wisdom teeth with the other, and even then I could feel myself craving still another job."

We all recognise that kind of twitch; the instinctive check of the mobile phone (each of us does that every six minutes throughout the day, on average), the trouble concentrating for an entire film, or for a whole book.
[...]

"We are humans, not robots," Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein told Fast Company recently. "We're engaged in a creative endeavour that requires a lot of energy, and so if you're constantly involved in the output – in the exhale – then you'll run out of breath." The nub for his company, which runs a project management service, is that balance is about the wellbeing of his staff, and means more than just productivity. Mindfulness is seen as an enquiry for objectivity, a way to claw back some of the equilibrium of how we exist in the real world, rather than the hyper-mediated place we create for parts of ourselves online."