Cathy Davidson’s new book argues that we perceive only a fraction of everything going on around us, and this attention blindness ill prepares us for the multi-tasking Internet age. By Casey Schwartz.

Relatively speaking, relationships used to be simple. Or at least simpler. Maybe just not as complicated.

Once upon a time your professional relationships stayed in one place, your personal relationships in another, and you controlled where those blurred through. That control is no longer in your hands. Your friends, family, co-workers and clients are all free to mingle and there’s nothing you can do about it. And while you may have lost control over who gets to talk to who, you can still control your own behavior, so let’s focus on that.

There seems to be a mass of cheerleaders out there who are celebrating this digital revolution, particularly in education.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right.

May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled "The Internet Tidal Wave," to all executive staff within Microsoft. In it, he makes clear his intention to focus the company's efforts online with immediate effect and "assign the Internet the highest level of importance," going on to call it, "the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981."

Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right?

Wrong.

If it’s complex it can’t work until it’s empty.

In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle examines our proclivity for robots, smart phones and social networks, and though far from suggesting we ditch technology, she wonders if we aren't losing out on human contact in the process.

New Internet technologies allow online users to create content. Some of this content is brand information that traditionally developed and promoted by advertising agencies. Agencies have reacted to this phenomenon in different ways: some embrace it, some ignore it, and others encourage employees to act as consumers in developing content, perhaps in questionable ways. This essay presents a concept called confluence culture to describe the changes that the advertising industry is currently undergoing relative to the rise of digital culture. We argue that all advertisers, in order insure their relevancy, must recognize the role confluence culture plays in their work.

Link to the book on how to use Google Chrome - new browser from Google.

Watch the Web. There is always something good on ...

A new search engine that presents content that is readable for both humans and machines.

An interesting article on the hurdles of launching a start-up / technology product.

A list of recent online trends from the Pew Internet Life Project.