Book deals with implications of constantly connected world

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The enormous amount of information and the information technology surrounding us with increasingly sophisticated tools and methods are not only changing our ways of living but also ways of thinking and probably even how our brains work, authors of a new book say.

While accepting that we live in a constantly connected world, we at times need to disconnect to reconnect with the world, they advise.

The connected world has changed the premise of what it means to be human, and it will continue to impact lives at a rapidly growing pace in the years to come, both on a personal and professional level says the book "Connected or Disconnected: The Art of Operating in a Connected World".

 

It talks about how to handle the challenges constant connectedness pose to one's wellbeing - sleeping patterns, close relations, work-life balance, and parenting.

In the book, published by SAGE, authors Micke Darmell and Kapil Rampal describe how to handle the new challenges that constant connection brings and when to step out of it in order to tend to our wellbeing.

"The connected society comes with a promise of democratisation, context and accessible information. But if we don't learn to relate to the constancy of it, it will increase stress, impair our sleep, and lead to superficial relationships and low performance," the authors say.

The technology changes are so fast that one can see significant differences in behaviour, ways of thinking, and maybe even brain functionality between different generations, the book says.

"No matter how fast technical development is and how quickly our society changes and is modernised, our brains are constructed in roughly the same way as they were 50,000 years ago," it says.

"Even if our brain is malleable and changes according to our environment, it is impossible for it, in one generation, to learn how to focus in more than one thing at a time. When you think you are multitasking, you are in fact switching focus between two or more tasks," the authors argue.

"And the human brain struggles when challenged with parallel activities. Our focus can shift between two or more tasks and different people can do this at different speeds but we can only focus on one thing at a time," they say.