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Interesting perspective on attention. This addresses some of the issues we've discussed this week. I'd be interested to know if you're able to watch the entire video without doing anything else. I'm 6 minutes into it, and I'm composing an email for work, writing this, and texting a friend in the UK.

I finally had a chance to watch this talk by Rheingold. He's covering some of the issues that we've already discussed over the past couple of weeks. One of them is the need for our educational institutions to change in response to global communications changes (1 billion online users, 2 billion cell phone users). He says we need new forms of literacy both in terms of how to use these new technologies, as well as how to communicate effectively using them. He said this isn't a new situation - in the past, societies had to adapt to the technologies of the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, telephone, television, etc. One interesting quote: "Our educational system, our schooling system is very well tuned to creating good citizen workers for 19th and 20th Century industries."