This post first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News

by Larry Magid

A lot has been said and written about how Apple is likely to carry on without Steve Jobs at the helm. I have my opinions on why I think Apple will do OK, but the health of the company isn’t on my mind as much as the health of Steve Jobs himself.

He’s a powerful force in business, technology and entertainment, but he’s also a person, a husband and a father. In addition to his 33-year old daughter Lisa, who has the same name as the Apple computer that was the predecessor of the Macintosh, Jobs also has a son and two younger daughters from his 1991 marriage to Laurene Powell Jobs.

Steve Jobs and I aren’t personal friends, but I have known him for more than 27 years. I first met him when I was writing about the Apple II and then again in early 1984 when he gave me a sneak peek at the Macintosh. I wrote at the time that Apple “has started a fever in Silicon Valley that’s hard not to catch.” And I observed that “some analysts thought that Apple was a dying company” and that “Apple’s young chairman, Steve Jobs, blames his company’s relatively poor performance on trying to compete with IBM on its own terms rather than ‘getting back to our roots.’ ”

The irony of that quote is that he could have also said it in 1997 when he returned to Apple after it acquired Jobs’ NeXT computer platform. By 1997, Apple was starting to look like yet another PC clone company until Jobs’ triumphant return. Despite its unique Mac operating system, its products were becoming drab and ordinary.

Jobs doesn’t tolerate ordinary and it didn’t take long before he started adding some color to the company — literally — by replacing some of those drab Mac desktops with the iMac G3 with its teardrop shape and translucent plastic case. It wasn’t the most powerful computer on the market and far from the lowest price, but it sure was the most interesting one to look at.

Jobs also took that occasion to jettison the floppy disk drive — a staple in all PCs since the very early ’80s. I’m reminded of that as I type this column on my MacBook Air, which doesn’t come with an optical CD/DVD drive, one more once essential vestige that Apple is trying to send to the dust bin.

Jobs’ willingness to part with the old was shown again in June 2010. I was in the audience when he told attendees at Walt Mossberg’s and Kara Swisher’s All Things Digital Conference that we are entering the “post-PC era.” Speaking about his own Macs as well as other PCs, Jobs said, “the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer.” He likened PCs to trucks, adding “when we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.”

We’re still not at the point where most people can get away with an iPad instead of a PC, but I know some who have done just that. Ironically, Apple — the very company whose former CEO thinks the PC is becoming gradually extinct — is a company whose PC sales are growing instead of shrinking.

While Jobs has played a pivotal and pioneering role in the PC industry ever since he and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II in 1977, he’s also had a major impact on other industries. The iPod and iTunes completely changed the business model of music recording business and the devices we use to play our music. His work at Pixar, which was acquired by Disney, revolutionized the way animated movies were made and Jobs’ baby, the iPhone, completely disrupted the smartphone business. The iPad is poised to do the same to the PC business and some of Apple’s Macs, like the MacBook Air, are redefining the way PCs look and work.

I’m one of millions who paid more than twice the going rate for an adequate PC laptop because MacBook Air’s slim form, light weight and fast boot up really do make a difference to those of us who carry PCs around a lot.

Apple TV, which Jobs described as a “hobby,” hasn’t exactly disrupted the TV business yet, but stay tuned. Rumor has it that more TV-related products are in the pipeline, including possibly an Apple branded TV set. It’s a good thing for the companies that make toilets that Apple hasn’t entered that market. If it did, Apple would be flush with success, leaving the rest of the industry swirling with envy.

As both an icon and a significant force in our local economy, I wish Apple and its new CEO Tim Cook the best. But mostly my thoughts are with Steve and his family. As I said in an earlier column, he’s a national treasure who I hope will stick around for as long as possible.

In an effort to make thing simpler and more obvious, Facebook is changing the way people control who has access to their posts, status updates, pictures and other content. The company is also changing tagging so that users will have the option to approve tags before they take effect.

This is the biggest change to Facebook privacy setting since May of 2010 when the company last tried to simplify controls.  But,  based on what I can tell from my pre-briefings, they seemed to have done a better job this time.

Inline privacy settings

The most significant change is that users will be able to more easily control who gets to see each post, photo or other content as they are creating the post.  Whenever you post content, there will be an opportunity to decide who can see it.

For example, you can chose to share a particular post with just your Facebook friends or you can share it with the public.  You can also select Custom to fine tune who sees it down to an individual person if you want.  In a few weeks, Facebook will also add Groups to the list, enabling you to share content with specific groups of friends.

Everyone and Minors

Facebook is dropping the term “everyone” as a sharing option because people found that confusing. Public can be anyone on Facebook or even anyone on the Internet.

Minors (users under 18) will not have the option to share with the public. They will be limited to friends or friends of friends.

In-line privacy controls

 Changing your mind

One nice change is that you can now edit a post’s privacy settings. If I post something to Public and later decide to restrict it to friends, I can go back and change it at any time.

Cautionary note about inheriting settings

Users need to be aware that whatever setting they last made will become the default setting until you change it.  So, if you usually post to “Friends” and later post something to “Public,” the next time you post it will go to the public unless you change it back again.

Tagging

In what Facebook describes as a response to user requests, they are allowing people be able to approve photos and other items before the tag takes effect.  If a user decides to turn on this feature, all items they are tagged in go into pending status until the user approves them. That way, if your friend posts an ugly picture of you, you can prevent it from being tagged with your name. You can’t necessarily prevent the person from posting it, but at least you won’t be tagged.  By default this feature is off but you can turn it on in your profile settings.

Facebook is also making it clearer that removing a tag once it has been set doesn’t result in the content being removed but is now adding “social reporting” on photos and posts from others  to make it easier to request that the person take down the content if it bothers you.

New tool lets you remove tag or ask person to remove content

For greater transparency, Facebook will now disclose who actually put a tag on any content.  That information has always been available to the person who was tagged but now it will be available to anyone who sees the content. The hope is that the greater transparency will discourage people from tagging in ways that are abusive or obnoxious.

You now tag anyone anything including non-friends

In the past you had to be friends with someone to tag them or if you wanted to tag  a page from a business, public person or organization you had to “like” them first.

Now you can tag anyone.  For example, there might be a group photo with lots of people in it including people who aren’t your friends. Before you could only tag your friends but now you can tag anyone.  And lets say there’s a company you want to comment on (perhaps critically) but you don’t “like” that company or want to get updates from them. You can now tag them without having to like them.

Adding location

Expanding on the idea of its Places location check-in, Facebook is allowing users to disclose their location in any post, including on the web. It can take advantage of location aware technology (such as IP address) but you can override that if you want.  For example, you could be at home in Iowa and post something about that trip to New York you just took or that trip to Paris you hope to take and location-stamp those post.

Profile privacy settings

As in the past, Facebook will allow users to control over who can see various parts of their profile (such as hometown) but is making it a bit easier to find and configure them.  As you go through your profile, privacy settings for each setting will be more obvious.

Facebook is putting Edit Profile controls in context and simplifying settings

Also, as a result of moving many settings inline, the general profile profile settings will be shorter and less complicated, according to Facebook.

Changes rolling out

The changes may not be immediately evident but they will roll out over the next few days. Facebook will provide a tour of the new features, help center information and other tools to help users adjust to the changes

Not copying Google+

At first glance it might appear that Facebook is responding to Google+’s use of Circles, which is somewhat like the new inline privacy controls. I might have thought that too but I as a member of Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board, I was pre-briefed on these changes, several months before Google launched Google+ so this is clearly not a reaction to Google+ though it makes Facebook’s controls a bit more like those of Google.

For some analysis

For some analysis of what this means to users, please see the NetFamilyNews post by my ConnetSafely.org co-director, Anne Collier.

Discloser: Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org which receives financial support from Facebook, Google and other companies.

This post is adapted from an article that first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News

by Larry Magid

Last week I wrote about how some British politicians wanted BlackBerry maker Research In Motion to shut down its BlackBerry Messenger service in central London because the technology was being used to help organize riots. The government never demanded that, but the mere thought of it was enough to get me to question whether the politicians were treading on dangerous ground and violating free speech rights, despite their lofty intentions to prevent riots.

It was no great surprise when Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak resorted to shutting off phone and Internet service, but it’s a bit unthinkable that a tactic like that would be used in a democratic country like the United Kingdom.

Well, think again. After I filed last week’s column, the issue hit a lot closer to home. BART officials — in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live — did what some London politicians only dreamed of. They suspended cellphone service by pulling the plug on equipment that enables signals from the major cell providers to reach people in BART’s underground stations and trains.

BART was quick to point out that they didn’t jam signals (that would violate federal law) but disabled their own equipment, which they had earlier installed as a convenience to customers. Jamming is illegal, but there is no law that requires BART or anyone else to put in special equipment to make cellular service accessible to people using their facilities. After all, there was a time when cell service simply wasn’t available in BART underground stations.

But it seems to me that once BART installed the equipment, disabling it for the purpose of cutting off communications — whatever the motivation — is treading on dangerous ground. It’s also important to remember that BART is a public agency — essentially an arm of the government. And when government interferes with the communications of citizens, it brings up a lot of issues for anyone who cares about civil liberties. I’ll leave it up to the Federal Communications Commission and others to decide whether what BART did was illegal. But as far as I’m concerned, it was at the very least boneheaded.

I know the arguments. BART was worried about a planned protest getting out of hand and reportedly made the decision in the interest of public safety.

Courts have ruled that there are limitations to free speech, including yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But I’m not sure that preventing protesters from using their cellphones to talk, tweet and text rises to the same level of threat to the public.

It’s not as if this is the first time anyone has used communications technology to organize a protest. Printing presses, mimeograph machines and bullhorns were used for that purpose long before cellphones came along, and any attempt to shut down presses in a democratic society is generally roundly condemned regardless of what those presses were printing.

We can debate whether the public was any safer as a result of cutting cell service. But even if a safety claim could be made for shutting down service, an equally compelling claim could be made that BART’s action jeopardized public safety. By shutting down all service, they made it impossible for BART commuters who are doctors or other first responders to be reached in an event of an emergency. And BART also made it impossible for its customers — including those who had nothing to do with the protest — to use their phones to report an emergency, to call home to say that the protest might delay their journey or to make other arrangements to get home.

It could be argued that the protest made it more important than ever to allow people to use their phones. After all, if BART is worried that a protest could threaten safety, that’s all the more reason for people to have phones in case there were injuries or threats that needed to be reported.

As I said about the London riots, police have an absolute right to arrest people who are breaking the law, and anyone who disrupts train service ought to know that their illegal actions could land them in jail. But there’s a big difference between punishing people who break the law and blocking off communication systems just because some might use them to plan an illegal action.

Based on that theory, none of us should have the right to use the phone or even carry on a personal conversation. You never know what those two people sitting next to you in the coffee shop might be plotting.

A new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that 42% of Americans have used their cell phones to alleviate boredome and 13% have faked using their phone to avoid having to interact with the people around them.

The study, called Americans and their cell phones,  also found that 40% of cell phone users have had to use their phone in an emergency and that just over half of all adult cell phone users “had used their phone at least once to get information they needed right away.”

The study, which focused on adult cell phone users, also broke down the data by age and, as you might expect, young adults are more likely to use their phones for all sorts of information purposes than folks over 30.  For example, 95% of 18-29 year olds had sent or received a text, 91% used a phone to take a picture and 72% had sent a photo to someone else.

For more on the story, listen to my podcast interview with the study’s director, Aaron Smith.

“The servers that house Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger don’t have a political, social or legal agenda. Their job is simply to transmit what people post and deliver it to people who want to see it.”

by Larry Magid

This article is adapted and updated from one that appeared in the August 15, 2011 edition of the San Jose Mercury News

There have been a lot of mixed messages lately about social networking and messaging.

Many people in the United States and Europe have praised the role that Twitter, Facebook and text messaging played in the uprisings in the Middle East that had contributed to democracy movements in Iran, Tunisia and other countries and led to the resignation of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.

But recently we’ve heard very different messages from some police and politicians in the United Kingdom and from officials at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) in San Francisco, which actually cut off cell phone service at four underground stations to quell a planned protest.

BART derails cell service

The irony is that only a handful of protesters actually showed up for last week’s protest but thanks to BART’s cell-phone cutting , there were a lot more protesters at Monday’s follow-up demonstration that resulted in the closure of several stations.  In the meanwhile, the interruption in cell phone service was  condemned by some free speech advocates and is being investigated by the FCC.  As far as I know, it’s the first time a U.S.-based government agency has shut down cell phone service, a tactic used unsuccessfully by former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in an attempt to thwart protests in his country.

UK keeps messages flowing despite calls from politicians

On the UK front, London’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Kavanagh reportedly told BBC Radio that “social media and other methods have been used to organize these levels of greed and criminality and we need to adapt and learn from what we are experiencing.” That isn’t necessarily a condemnation of the media, but it’s an acknowledgment that police don’t know quite how to handle the way the technology is being used by people in the streets.

Based on reports, it appears that BlackBerry Messenger, not Twitter or Facebook, is the tool of choice for rioters and looters in Britain. The app, which is free from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM), lets people send messages to individuals or groups of people that can be password protected with a PIN number. The messages can be forwarded to others with BlackBerrys but because they are encrypted, they might not be available to authorities and they’re much harder to trace.

British Parliament member David Lammy used Twitter to call upon Research In Motion to suspend its BBM service, tweeting “BBM clearly helping rioters outfox Police. Suspend it.”

This incident brings up a lot of issues similar to the First Amendment issues here in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has supported the free speech rights of people who espouse some pretty unpopular and downright ugly causes, including famously backing the right of a neo-Nazi party to march in Skokie, Ill. As civil liberties advocates often say, protecting popular or socially acceptable speech is easy, what’s hard is when you come to the defense of people who are saying things that are despicable or potentially could cause others to act out in ways that are violent or dangerous.

Well, the same is true with technology. The servers that house Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger don’t have a political, social or legal agenda. Their job is simply to transmit what people post and deliver it to people who want to see it.

Those posts can be in support of causes that many of us support, such as the right of Iranians to freely assemble or the right of Egyptians to demand the ouster of an oppressive leader. But the same technologies can also be used to espouse unpopular causes or even rally people to anti-social, illegal or destructive acts.

No one complains when technology is used to organize a “flash mob” to break out in a spontaneous song and dance routine in Grand Central Terminal, yet the mayor of Philadelphia was outraged when young people were using those same technologies to organize a mob that attacked people on the street. The mayor was correct in condemning the behaviors, but it’s important to remember that the technology — even the idea of using technology to call people to action — is neither good nor evil. It’s neutral.

Ironically, Facebook decided to release its own Facebook Messenger product during one of the worst days of London rioting. Like RIM’s BBM service, Facebook Messenger is being offered as a way to help people communicate with their friends. But like all tools, it could be used for nefarious purposes as well. While authorities should educate themselves about these tools, they need to understand that their role is to discourage and punish illegal behavior, not neutral technologies.

Arrest the hooligans if they break the law, but don’t shoot the BlackBerry or Facebook Messenger and let the cell phones ring, even if it means having to put up with some protesters in your railway station.

Picture of IBM PC from an early edition of PC Magazine

An anniversary for me, too

On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its first personal computer known as the IBM PC.  I remember it well because I wrote the EasyWriter manual to accompany the word processing program that IBM sold along with that original PC.  I first saw the PC in April, 1981 after being hired as the “Director of Publications” at Information Unlimited Software, a small software firm in Kensington, California that IBM contracted to port the software from the Apple II to its as-yet-unannounced PC. In late 1981 I left the software company and became an editor of PC Magazine during its first year of operation.

The PC wasn’t the first personal computer. Apple was doing well with its Apple II and Radio Shack was on its second generation of PCs by the time “Big Blue” entered the market. There were also several PC makers in the business end of the market with machines that ran the CP/M operating system.

But it wasn’t until IBM threw its hat in the ring that businesses and even most consumers started taking personal computing seriously.  Up until that time, personal computers were mostly for hobbyists and those willing to live on the “bleeding edge” of technology.

Cover sheet for IBM's EasyWriter manual, written by yours truly

The first PC came standard with 16 kilobytes (KB) of memory at a bare-bones price of $1,265 without a monitor or a diskette drive.  A full-blown system with 64K of memory, two floppy drives, a display/printer adapter card and a monochrome screen cost $3,735 in 1981 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that’s $9,275 today.  IBM’s dot matrix printer and its required cable added another $610 to the price tag for a grand total of $4,345. In November of 1981, I wrote an article for PC Magazine called “PC on a Budget” where I wrote about how to assemble your own PC for “only” $3,399.

Chart from 1981 issue of PC Magazine showing cost of PC at retail or if you buy your own parts and put it together yourself

To put the power of that PC into perspective with today’s technology consider that a modern but modest PC with 4 gigabytes of memory and a 160 GB hard drive has more than 65,000 times the memory and a million times the storage of that first PC.  Even today’s smartphones have far more memory, storage and processing power than IBM’s entry into the market.

IBM is no longer in the PC business. It sold its personal computer division to China-based Lenovo in 2004. Lenovo is now one of the leading makers of laptop PCs with its popular ThinkPad line.

Put manual on overnight plane

I actually used an Apple II to write the manual for the PC because there weren’t enough PC prototypes in our office for me to use one. Besides, the programmers were busy writing the word processing software at the same time I was writing the manual.  I had a modem on my Apple II,  but, for some reason, the IBM development team in Boca Raton, Florida apparently didn’t have one so,  on many nights, I would drive to the San Francisco Airport to put the latest draft of the manual on an overnight flight so they could review it in the morning. Delta charged a minimum of $40 ($99.33 in today’s money) for this  service.

Honeymoon cut short

To give you an idea of the intensity of the project, I was married on Sunday May 3, 1981, but I was given only one day off for the honeymoon.  I was back to work on Tuesday.  Unlike the IBM PC, Patti and my marriage is still current.

by Larry Magid

Depending on one’s perspective, Twitter and Facebook have been credited and blamed for helping to organize uprisings in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.  But. when it comes to the riots in London, even though there is plenty of chatter on these two services, it appears as if Blackberry Messenger (BBM) is the organizational weapon of choice for coordinating  and recruiting people in the ongoing riots in Tottenham and other parts of London.

While discussing the role of Twitter and Facebook in helping spread information about the original cause of the riots (the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan) the Guardian reported that “the most powerful and up-t0-the-minute rallying appears to have taken place on a more covert social network: Blackberry Messenger.”

Unlike Twitter where most messages are posted publicly, BBM makes it easy to send private messages that are protected by a PIN code. Messages can be one to one and one to many and can be forwarded.  Messages are encrypted and they can be much more difficult for authorities to trace than Tweets or Facebook updates.

Research in Motion, which makes Blacberry devices and operates the BBM service has said that it will cooperate with British police, according to ZDNet UK.  A spokesperson for the company said “We feel for those impacted by the riots in London,” and “we have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.”

A free BBM app is available directly from Research in Motion and there are other “BBM connected apps” from third parties, including some that use GPS and other technologies to report your location to friends.

Video: Larry discusses BBM use in London on Al Jazeera English

This article first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on August 8, 2011

by Larry Magid

Bitflx founders Sebastian Andreatta and Gary Geschwind at the Palo Alto Cafe

Technology makes it possible for us to be in touch with people all around the world, but we live locally. We can get our news from BBC or Al-Jazeera and listen to radio stations from any continent. But when we want traffic information while driving, we turn to local radio stations, and it’s our local newspapers (or their websites) that keep us up to date with what’s happening in our community.

The same is true with our offline lives. Our coffee beans may come from Columbia or Ethiopia, but when we want to buy a steaming hot cup of the brew, we visit a local coffee shop.

One of those coffee shops is the Palo Alto Cafe in Silicon Valley, where I occasionally stop by for a cappuccino and conversation with a group of neighbors who show up most mornings. Two people I sometimes run into there are Sebastian Andreatta and Gary Geschwind, who met each other at the cafe five years ago and, over coffee one day, came up with the idea for a new smartphone app called Bitflx because “it was time to do something cool with our smartphones other than play games and get wrong directions,” according to their website.

Geschwind is a photography buff and Andreatta a veteran of other telecommunication startups. Together the two launched a company and commissioned an iPhone app that allows people to use their phone to shoot video in their local communities to share with other smartphone users and on the Web.

The idea is for people to shoot videos of things that they might want to share with others in their local community, such as an exciting play at a high school football game, a traffic accident that’s snarling up traffic on a local highway or the presentation of a dynamite meal at a local restaurant.

The app, said Andreatta, is all about time and place. It’s not competing with YouTube, which is more about archiving video for global access. Bitflx is more like your local news stations that focuses on what is happening right now, where you live.

“Being able to communicate in a more meaningful way with the people around you, the friends that are nearby, the neighborhood, can be pretty powerful,” Andreatta said.

In addition to using video to comment on and document things around you, he also envisions “a news reporting/neighborhood angle,” including using the service to help find the owner of a lost dog or bicycle, or letting neighbors see that the garbage truck is down the street, so it might be a good time to bring out the trash can or move your car.

Bitflx lets you categorize your videos

The app, which currently works on iPhones and the newest iPads and iPod touch devices, allows you to take a video and quickly post it to their site, and also gives you the option to share it on your Facebook profile. The app also has a video viewer that displays pins on a map. A purple pin designates your current location, blue pins show recent videos posted by your friends, green pins show videos posted by local merchants and red pins show videos from others. You can also view by time and date.

The app was recently launched, so there aren’t a huge number of videos to look at. Like other social apps and sites, the ultimate value of Bitflx will grow if more people use it.

Of course Bitflx is hardly the first time that the “world-wide” Web has been used to enhance our local experiences. In addition to the websites of thousands of local news organizations — including an increasing number of Internet only local sources like AOL’s Patch.com — we’re seeing a mushrooming trend in local coupon services. Groupon, which has filed for a public stock offering, is the best-known example, but local is now getting the attention of big players like Amazon and Google.

Amazon is expanding its AmazonLocal service from its test site in Boise to 14 cities around the country, including its hometown of Seattle and Chicago, which is where Groupon is based. Google just bought a very similar service called Dealmap. Amazon is also an investor in LivingSocial, yet another local discount site.

I find it a bit ironic yet totally appropriate that international Internet giants like Amazon and Google would invest in companies that help you find discounts at local brick-and-mortar establishments.

Let’s face it, Amazon is a great place to buy a book or a digital camera, but until someone perfects teleportation, it’s not a great place for a massage, a car wash or a hot meal. Same is true with Google. It can help you find great places to eat locally or anywhere in the world, but unless you’re an employee with access to one of the many great eating places at its Mountain View Googleplex or one of its satellite offices, Google can only feed your mind, not your body.

Click here to listen to my one minute CBS News/CNET Tech Talk segment about Bitflx.

The FBI has released a simple iPhone app, called the Child ID App, that can store information about your children and send it to authorities in the unlikely event they go missing. Parents fill out information about the child in the app and use it to take a photo of the child. The data is stored on your phone (not sent to the FBI or anyone else) unless there is an emergency when you can email it to appropriate parties.

When I wrote about the app on my CNET blog, a reader commented that the FBI should have provided password protection to avoid anyone seeing this data if they got hold of your phone. Another reader pointed out that you can password protect the iPhone itself.  Still, I agree that a password option would have been a good idea.

The app isn’t as elegantly designed as it could be. For example you have to type in gender rather than select from male or female and you’re not restricted from typing in letters in fields that should be numbers only. But I don’t think any of that really matters in the long run. What’s important is that you have the information you need to immediately pass on to authorities and possibly the media if the need ever arises.

For details, see my blog post on CNET News.

by Larry Magid
This article appeared in the August 1, 2011 edition of the San Jose Mercury News

Like many of you reading this, I have to deal with a constant barrage of emails along with tweets, Facebook messages, text messages and now Google+ updates. And that’s on top of my landline and cellphone ringing as well as my dog needing attention and the usual interruptions from family members.

I work at home. People who work in an office often have to deal with colleagues stopping by asking, “Do you have 30 seconds?”

Well, even if that interruption really is only for 30 seconds, recovery time turns out to be between 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption, according to Jonathan Spira, the chief analyst at Basex and author of “Overload: How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization.”

Spira, a panelist at a Churchill Club event last week appropriately titled “Information Overload 2.0,” said it “takes time for the neurons to fire and it takes time for you to regain your thoughts and recapture the flow of what you were thinking.” And sometimes, he added, what’s lost cannot be recaptured.

I used to think I could manage my own often-interrupted life by “multitasking.” But except for things like walking and chewing gum, multitasking is a myth. When it comes to cognitive tasks, our brains aren’t really capable of competently doing more than one thing at a time.

While I’m sitting in front of the two monitors attached to my PC, I have a Twitter feed in the lower right corner of my main screen, my word processing document in the center and a Gmail session on the other monitor. What I’m really doing is switching my attention back and forth between these three information sources. Trouble is, every time we switch our attention back and forth, it takes a little time.

“The studies we have done,” said Spira “showed that attempts to multitask slowed people down, while studies other people have done have shown that the brain can’t really multitask.”

Molecular biologist John Medina agrees. “We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously,” he wrote in his book “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.”

A 2007 study (PDF) conducted by Shamsi T. Iqbal of the University of Illinois and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research looked at how we handle switching between computer programs. While PC operating systems and processors have evolved to the point that they are very good at multitasking, the processors between our ears aren’t so up-to-date. Iqbal and Horvitz found that “participants spent, on average, nearly 10 minutes on switches caused by alerts, and spent on average another 10 to 15 minutes (depending on the type of interruption) before returning to focused activity on the disrupted task.”

And just because you got to work clear headed doesn’t mean your brain can’t become foggy as a result of how you’re working. A 2005 University of London study, according to the BBC, found that “Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in a marijuana smoker.” And multitasking might actually be more addicting than pot. More than half of the people surveyed in that study said they always responded to an email “immediately” or as soon as possible, with 21 percent admitting they would interrupt a meeting to do so, according to the BBC.

Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz, who is managing the new Google+ project, was also on the Churchill Club panel. Horowitz said Google is trying to encourage what he called “meeting hygiene” to help people better focus. That includes times when laptops are to remain closed. I sit on the board of a couple of nonprofits and at a meeting a couple of years ago it was time to vote on something and I realized I had paid no attention to the discussion because I was reading email instead of listening to the debate.

I now try to keep my laptop closed and my smartphone in my pocket during meetings, though I sometimes slip. At other times I knowingly trade paying close attention to the people around me so that I can connect with people online.

At last week’s panel, for example, I was live tweeting and updating Google+ with what the panelists were saying, which meant that potentially thousands of people around the world could learn from the very panel that I was failing to pay full attention to. And it’s likely some of the people reading my tweets and posts were in meetings or on deadlines and being overloaded.

The problem of task switching also affects us behind the wheel. Studies have confirmed my intuitive sense that using a hands-free phone doesn’t make you safer. I have two hands but only one brain. It’s not hard to steer a car with one hand, but as I realized recently after missing a freeway off-ramp, it’s awfully hard to carry on an intense conversation and keep my mind on the road.