ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the history of information, debates about overload, new paradigms in embodied cognition, and developments in urban computing to debate this claim. Instead of joining those debates, consider a larger, more consensual trend in the cognitive sciences. Distraction has long been assumed to be the core trait of modern urban subjectivity. This makes ubiquity something quite different from the industrial and media monocultural effects behind high modern sociological notions of distraction. Despite how the social critics of modern broadcast culture made that process a central story in urban sociology, the increasing complexity of ubiquity has changed the conditions substantially. A designer, a cultural historian, an urban sociologist, or a technological entrepreneur might each have their own sense of this transformation. Interaction designers understand the best about screens, especially individual graphical user interfaces.
