The thing is, all this research is obviously very new.  We don’t yet fully understand how daily integration of online affects our brains, and our behaviour.  But more studies are being done, like this one (subs required) in SciAm mind.

The premise is that a new condition is emerging in the “wired” user (and can develop very quickly even in unwired users) - continuous partial attention.  In other words, we are continually partly aware of a lot of different sources of information:  Our blackberry, our Skype IM, the site we’re currently on, the TV in the background, the iPod playlist, and so on.  They all get an even attention as we attempt to balance out the data streams.

This distracted mental state means that everything is in our peripheral attention, and almost nothing gets our undivided attention.  This applies really well to web behavior (I’ve spent a lot of time in a previous position watching people use the web), and is starting to seep out into social behaviour, eating patterns and life in general.  Online, it goes something like this…

Click, glance, read, glance, click, IM, scroll, email, ad, recommendation, skim read, tweet, click, glance…..

Today’s wired human, the article suggests, suffers from this kind of “digital fog”, gets irritated, distracted and socially less active.  Our brains just weren’t built for this.

Well, they will be soon. 

One thing that’s clear about the human brain, is it’s remarkable ability to change itself in response to what’s required of it.  Question is, whether we’re capable of continually partially attending lots of data streams, or we’ll need more and more tools to process them on our behalf, and bring us back to what we’re biologically built for - single-focus attention.

• TV: 218 minutes
• Radio: 164 minutes
• Internet: 60 minutes

That’s right, the “lean-forward” medium we’re all breaking our backs over is a mere 60 minutes, or 13% of an average person’s day… 

Mind you, as my digital TV reception worsens, any TV I do watch is online via iPlayer and the equivalents at ITV and Channel 4.  That’s kind of half “lean-forward” half “sit-back” behaviour, as a) the screen isn’t big enough to be that far away, and b) endless Outlook email alerts interrupt anything I do try and watch.

I won’t spoil it, give it a go!

This is what I got from a quick chat with Elbot:

E: Hello dear user and welcome to Elbot! Just wondering, could you enter a single word that describes your energy level?

Variable

E: Well, my biorythms are all mixed up. Maybe because I’m not biological.

Way to give the loebner prize away!

E: Do you think you will win the Loebner prize?

oh sure

E: Please say that in some other way. I am not able to process ironic statements.

And so on, but much more random as time went on.  Not sure I’d want to meet the 25% that were fooled, but you can make your own mind up by chatting to Elbot right now: http://www.elbot.com/

1.  Triumph of the cloud - following on from Amazon’s EC2 services and the like, and from early attempts such as SETI@home’sdistributed search for E.T.  Verdict: quite likely, but conflicts with the growth in cheap-yet-powerful small webtops, mobile phones crammed with technology, and the commoditisation of high tech

2. Cyborg chic- by 2018 people will be evolving into cyborgs.  Though I think it will take (a lot) longer (viz Arthur C. Clarke predicting in 2001 - A Space Odyssey that we’d be colonizing the moon by now).  But head-embedded phones aren’t too far away, maybe 2025

3.  Everything works- a joke prediction that everything digital will work, though the prediction of “it even changes based on what you’re currently doing” is one I’m pretty much focused on right now…

4.  Nothing escapes you.  In other words, everything you do and experience lives on in a digital vault somewhere.  Actually, pretty useful and scary at the same time.  But inevitable.  Some people are “life logging” already

5.  Smartphones take center stage.  For sure they’ll be more ubiquitous and ever more useful, but I don’t think they’ll replace laptops/PCs in their current form.  Unless we evolve matchstick fingers and zoom lens in our eyes, we’re all of one broad size - and that size needs a keyboard and a screen.

6.  Human-free manufacturing.  Robots rule.  I thought this was already the case?

7.  Perfect image recognition.  Object recognition in images is being worked on all over the place, for sure, and everyone’s favorite human-shaped robot Asimo is currently learning to recognise objects.

8.  Big Brother never sleeps - yup, if we’re not being tracked already through every step we take, we’re about to be.  The UK government right now is trialling satellite tracking technology to help us all live better lives.  Sorry, I meant to tax us more and fine us if we pause on double yellow lines too long…

9.  Unbroken connectivity - that would be good

10.  Relationship enhancement - using technology to enhance our offline relationships (e.g. automatically storing their kids names for future recall).  Sure to happen.

Finally, then, a couple of my own along the same lines:

11.  Today’s top online brands won’t be the top brands in 10 years or even less (Facebook, Google, etc).  Hard to imagine, but almost guaranteed.

12.  Unified messaging.  I don’t actually care whether the message I just got was through Twitter, an SMS, the Blackberry Messaging service, interpreted voice via Spinvox, an email, smoke signals, or someone shouting across the room.  I really just care about the message.  Unify them, please, before I go mad.

While I’m on the subject, a bit more TomTom - style “social” networking of real-time traffic information would be welcome.  GPS routing on my 3G blackberry, where they offer some real-time traffic info is poor (make one different turning and downloading the new roads takes too long to catch up).  RDS doesn’t really work, and waiting for radio traffic reports is really, really old now.

Social driving brings up all sorts of new networking opportunities (stuck in the same traffic jam?  Drive the same route to work each day?  Want to send insults to the driver in the car in front?) - which you’ll either hate or love, depending on your viewpoint.  Me, I’d like to know in real time the quickest way to get from A to B in real-time, and not make too many wrong turns along the way… Simple.

Now there’s viral value.

The fact that he could have given (and probably did give) the same presentation 10 years ago sums up the bascis that are true of the design process - just the products change a bit.   To demonstrate that, he ended his talk with this video for Virgin’s upcoming space travel programme (Seymour Powell designed the interior of the space craft).  Yes, that’s space craft - launching in 2010, at Virgin Galactic, bookable right now.  Get a taste of what your $200,000 dollars will buy you :