Katherine Isbister will be our featured speaker at PARC Forum Thurs, Dec 15th at 5pm in Palo Alto at PARC’s Pake Auditorium. This is free for the public and you can register here. This blog is an excerpt of an article that currently appears on interactions.acm.org.
Many complain that we are mesmerized and divided by technologies as they saturate our world. That we are becoming disembodied, fragmented, distracted from the present moment and from one another. Take smartphones. It’s true that people frequently use them to be social with non-present others during perceived lulls in real-world conversations, causing them to become quite distracted. But it’s also true that people use smartphones to augment co-presence—sharing information to bolster discussion …