Workshop on Information, Silence, and Sanctuary

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This is funding to partially support a workshop to explore the problems of information overload, the fragmentation of attention, and the general busyness and speed up of everyday life. The goal of the meeting is to investigate this imbalance, to begin to map its causes and conditions, and to explore remedial actions. The workshop will be held in Seattle on May 10-12, 2004, and is expected to attract approximately 50 participants from a number of disciplines and walks of life, including the arts and humanities, technology, library and information sciences, economics, education, and religion. Participants will be selected to satisfy a number of criteria, including gender balance and representation of under-represented groups. The workshop will begin with a Public Forum on Information and the Quality of Life at Town Hall in downtown Seattle on the evening of May 10, attended by the workshop invitees and open to the general public at no charge. It will continue with two days of invitation-only meetings on the University of Washington campus. Discussion topics will include: the stress of overload; why are we so overloaded; silence and sanctuary; the role of public institutions in achieving balance; and sanctuary in, or from, cyberspace. There do not appear to have been any other recent meetings on exactly this subject. Partial funding for the workshop is being provided by the MacArthur Foundation, by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, and by the Online Computer Library Center.Broader Impacts: The PI's goal is to raise public awareness of the workshop topics and to stimulate broad discussion of them. To these ends, he will write a report summarizing the workshop presentations and its major findings, and will make it available online. In addition, he has secured agreement from the journal Ethics and Information Technology (Kluwer) to publish a special issue devoted to the workshop's findings, that will include a report on the workshop and papers produced by some of the participants. The PI hopes to generate extensive press coverage of the workshop, and plans to organize (in conjunction with the UW Libraries, the UW Henry Art Gallery, and the Seattle Public Library) public meetings at local (Seattle) libraries and museums on the workshop discussion topics, as well as panel(s) on these topics at one or more upcoming ACM conferences.