"We wanted to ask a different question," said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. "What happens to people who multitasking all the time?"
In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nass and Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir surveyed 262 students on their media consumption habits. The 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least then took two computer-based tests, each completed while concentrating only on the task at hand.
The publisher of America's most-famous blog lashes out at the poll and political horse race-driven mainstream media, saying it'll be up to the bloggers to make coverage of the next presidential election interesting. Those same bloggers, she argues, could also spell trouble for Hillary Clinton.
"For the past five hundred years, humans have used print - the book and its various page-based cousins - to move ideas across time and space. Radio, cinema and television emerged in the last century and now, with the advent of computers, we are combining media to forge new forms of expression. For now, we use the word "book" broadly, even metaphorically, to talk about what has come before - and what might come next."
Ask any news Web site manager about their site's current design (and state of continual redesign) and the desire to "simplify" is likely high on the wish list. Also near the top: making better use of social networking tools.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time.
A new feature on the Google toolbar-which is installed on millions of computers around the world-lets users comment about the content of any web page they visit; the comments are then visible to other toolbar owners when they visit that site (see screenshot to the left).