Abstract
The prospects of broadband infrastructure and attentive agents that promise to bring large volumes of information faster than ever, are discussed. Computing machines are expected to do routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. To be attentive, agents collect information about the user as well as information about the world, including what data the user works with. By studying how attentive agents notify or inform, it was found that certain display characteristics such as motion cause distraction and affect user performance.