blackrimglasses

There is an interesting article out of Alaska about sensory deprivation tanks, and their new-age origins and relative importance in today’s world. As I read it, especially about the authors struggles to free her brain from the troubles of the media-rich and need-rich everyday, I became a bit envious about her ability to turn this off in a tank of salt-water, but more, I saw a way to apply the sensory deprivation in other ways outside of a tank.

Since leaving school, and Santa Barbara in general, I have found myself oversaturated at all points of the day with both the need to consume information, and the desire to recontextualize that consumption into yet more information for others to consume. Whereas I used to just produce and consume at a pace that was easy (and at home, as I was a student), I’m not faced with the burden of being a manager, a husband, an entrepreneur (prospective) and still honoring all my commitments, while at the same time trying to keep ahead of the wave of the ever accelerating technological waveform.

Here is my day: Get up at 6, go to the gym, at 8:30 or so, go to the computer and start going through my RSS feeds to compile my news updates. I also check up on all the sites I run. 9:30 I leave for work, 10:00 I get in, and continue my news updates and catching up on my RSS feeds (220 of them), all the while both link-blogging and compiling my news update. That usually gets completed by 1:00PM. All day though I’m still combing RSS. What compels me is the feeling of missing something important, and everytime I resolve that I won’t comb delicious, or read every RSS feed, I end up missing something important and I revert back to the same habit.

I think what is driving my over saturation is not necessarily the need to know all the information that is going through the ethernet, but more the fear that I will miss something that is potentially life altering. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

All the technologies that are thought of as “Web 2.0″ serve to lessen the cognitive distance between want and fulfillment. We want news, but we don’t want to seek it out: RSS. We want to bookmark pages, but we don’t want to have versionitis between our multiple devices: delicious. We want to share photos without setting up our own gallery: Flickr. We want gratification of requests without the full HTTP request cycle: AJAX.

As the relative speed of the infrastructure has increased, so too has our desire for speed in our use of the infrastructure. Such desire was wrought upon us not necessarily by the proliferation of broadband media (as was predicted) in any “killer app” fashion, but more the ability to enable synchronicity and multiplicity of the ways in which we get and give information. Broadband turned out to not be so much an enabler of one application to saturate a pipe, but dozes to communicate to each other between desktop and server by multiplexing on one pipe. Who’d have thought in 2001 that ubiquitous communication would just serve MORE raw text packets rather than multicast video.

The portal mentality of the early web was done as a method of aggregating any and all content that would be of interest to a user on one page. This failed (although you wouldn’t know it anymore!) as people were more comfortable making their own arrangements for their own data, and thus making a personalized “portal” using various applications. Extended to now, the manner in which we aggregate information has extended out of the browser into multiple places of ingress for content, and thus the need to be able to reconcile all these different forms of content against each other.

When reading this article on sensory deprivation then, I found myself thinking a lot about the ways that I consume data, and the way that the act of consumption shapes the way I function. It also started me wondering how I can change these patterns to enable me to shut the brain off at certain times of the day in order to fully focus on things without the need to constantly be checking RSS feeds.

The ultimate question is: how do we digitally create a sensory deprivation chamber

Requirements:

• A system where one can shut everything out to the point of hallucantory information deprivation, and gradually and in a controlled manner, turn information sources on with deliberate ease.
• A system that can adapt to users wants/desires synchronically
• Reduction of both textual and visual stimuli while in consumption mode
• The ability to shut down all consumption mechanisms with a “kill switch”
• The ability to track consumption, and have those metrics recombine on the system (learning complexity)

Idealy, here is how this would work. I could sit down at the computer, and blank out everything save the two manners of information egress and ingress that are pertinant to that moment. All other distractions would be erased from the visual stimuli. At any point, I could press a button and everything would clear. This would come in handy when I’m on the phone, as I tend to keep working on the computer while on the phone, and my aural multitasking isn’t very high.

The system that enabled this would learn from my behavior and switch deprivation contexts at points through the day. So from news gathering to news posting, then to e-mail catch-up. What would eventually happen is I’d have a system that would know my habits and reflect those habits synchronically throughout the day.

This in effect would be my sensory deprivation chamber. Allowing me the ability to calm the firing neurons, while still using that state to enable more concentrated focus on any task that I desired, whether it is blogging, writing, programming or image editing.

Does this system exist?

This I do not know. I suppose through the use of some Applescript, Expose, etc one could create it. But I have yet to find a system that augments my life to such an extent that it becomes transparent in its methods. I saw films back in 1993 from HP, et al proposing a day in which software agents would do this, but that has yet to materialize. I think the reason why is that I am not relinquishing control; I’m just getting augmented by a system that enables me to exert more control over my working habits.

Proposal to the readers (if there are any)

How would you implement a sensory deprivation system? What tools would you use?