When gurus attack - Stowe Boyd gets defensive aboutLinda

Linda Stone has an odd way of responding to the comments I made recently about Continuous Partial Attention in my Reboot talk, Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Flow. I guess she must have a google search bot running for Continuous Partial Attention, and it led her to Stephanie Booth’s post about my talk. Fine. But she left a comment there addressed to me, as if it was my blog, not Stephanie’s. But I don’t think Linda looked at my slides. She certainly wasn’t there for the presentation. I am not Stephanie Booth, so her paragraph is her own take on what I said. Here’s Linda’s comment:

Stowe,

I read your paragraph above regarding my continuous partial attention thesis. Once again, you appear to misunderstand my work. Check http://www.continuouspartialattention.com.

Continuous partial attention is not something that I judge to be “good” or “bad.” EVERY attention strategy has a place and matches to an activity, a desire. CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention, that is — operating in a constant state of vigilance, high alert, always on, is stressful to the body. It creates an adrenalized fight or flight state, cortisol floods the body. The bottom line: continuous partial attention some of the time can be a great thing. Continuous, continuous partial attention — or continuous partial attention ALL the time, is a contributing factor to insomnia, obesity, and stress-related diseases.

Cheers,

Linda

Ok, again Linda asserts that I don’t understand what she is saying. First of all, you superficially state that you don’t think CPA is good or bad, but then she tries splitting a hair by asserting that its only CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention that’s bad, leading to obesity, insomnia, and dandruff. CONTINUOUS continuous? Isn’t continuous once enough?

She seems to be saying CPA isn’t bad so long as you don’t do it CONTINUOUSLY. Isn’t that the whole point?

Sure — I accept the notion that at some times it may be attractive to close the door, turn off the music, and only listen to the tiny voices in your head. But I believe that the value of that sort of disconnected time is over-rated: it’s not a given of human psychology, it’s a cultural, learned behavior.

I don’t think that CPA leads to your adrenal glands being in an uproar, unless you have grown up in an environment where CPA is foreign, like baby boomers. Modern homo sapiens is content with constantly scanning, constantly grooming tribe members, constantly remaining connnected, constantly juggling. I don’t have insomnia.

Here’s the slide I used in my talk, which I pulled from something she wrote back in 2002:

In the talk, I lumped her and her anti-CPA screed (Yes, Linda, that’s how I interpret it, and please stop telling me I don’t understand you. I understand you better than you do.) along with Toffler’s Information Overload (it’s driving us crazy, he asserted) and the Attention Economy mavens (free information leads to attention scarcity). I don’t buy any of it.

Here’ the Contrarian View to CPA:

One of the points I made at Reboot is that we will be in a war with the folks that want to tell us that flow is bad for us:

(Yes, that is Instant Messaging Barbie. If anyone out there has one, I would love to buy it!)

Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don’t do things that way.

13 June 2007 Permalink

Continual partial reflection

A number of things popping up about attention.

I wrote an interview with Linda Stone the other day (see A Chat With Linda Stone) where the central theme was continuous partial attention, a term she coined some years ago. Here’s what I wrote this week:

Linda wanted both to make clear what she really believes and to see if we really were in agreement.

She started by trying to clarify her thoughts on continuous partial attention (CPA) stating that CPA is not the disorder that is besetting us. The disorder is ADD, she says, while CPA is — in small doses, anyway — a sensible adaptive behavior to the always-on, crazybusy world we live in. But if we surrender to CPA, we lose something significant, she maintains, and an excess of CPA means we start to live life in a crisis management mode, and any manner of dangers appear when we don’t pay attention to what is in front of us, and instead remain connected to the outside world.

In particular, Linda focused on the importance of paying attention to people as an aspect of building relationships. She talked about relationship building as one of the key benefits of staff meetings. When people turn off their phones, shut the screens of their PCs, and pay attention, she asserts that there is a different quality to the meeting, because people are incredibly responsive to the attention of others.

Still, maybe my sense of disagreement with Linda is some fundamental psychological issue. When I was chatting with her, I recalled my freshman physics class, where the professor simply talked too slow for me. This was in the early 70s so there were no laptops or sidekicks to help me while away the seemingly endless gaps between his words. So I listened to music on a pre-walkman cassette player, and read the text from my chemistry class. The professor actually came up to me after the third or fourth class, to ask me what I was up to, and I told him he spoke so slowly I was going to sleep, so I used this technique to remain — paradoxically — focused on the class. After I started to turn in A’s he stopped worrying about it.

And perhaps Linda is right, on some level, about the relationship issue: if somehow I had been able to remain laser focused on the instructor, instead of having my mind wander, we might have had some life-changing relationship emerge. Instead I opted for a relationship-reducing path, but one that led to me meeting the near-term goal of getting an A in physics, as well as in chemistry. In fact I got straight A’s that year, and made the Dean’s list, and one of the tricks I used was time-slicing at every opportunity: reading my notes over for physics whever my calculus instructor was reviewing something I had down cold already.

Maybe this is what Linda considers a sensible application of CPA, not an excessive one. But my hunch is that a lot of the stuff that I think is sensible — like IMing with colleagues about project A while on a telcon with other colleagues talking about project B — would be over the line with Linda. However, I have surrendered to the crazybusy cycle, and instead of trying to turn back the clock, I am looking for a better clock: one with more hands, running on a rate faster than seconds. I am looking for better technology to save me before I fall off the edge I am dancing on. In a post yesterday (What’s Missing: A Web 2.0 Critique), I called out for a better sort of personal/social information management tool. I know I need it, and if I do, there are millions of others out there looking for it.

Some of what Linda says seems like a request for better ettiquette surrounding social interaction in the always on world. Fine. But maybe the reason it sounds oldtimey to me is that I don’t spend my time in large corporations, in staff meetings, or the like. I am a soloist, spending most of my time connected to people remotely, and that sense of connection, however tenuous, is all that I have. I have to remain in touch with my posse, or I have nothing but myself. There is no organization backing me up.

That post got one lonely comment, from Daniel Belanger, who wrote:

There is a phenomenon I have only seen in the States. Here is what Stowe wrote in one paragraph:

“Perhaps because I am more ADD than her….”

I have heard countless times, this almost pride in people putting ADD on their nametag. And it always sound like the ultimate excuse for I don’t know what. ADD is mainly a fabrication of the drug market in America. Not such a concern abroad, maybe because it doesn’t quite exist as it is pretended here. And for some, it is cool. “Oh yeah, I have ADD, I know now how to live with it. That is why I can’t stay focus. Well I guess you will have to deal with it then.” Another way to deflect responsibility. “Sorry I can’t manage my attention, I can’t stay focus, not my fault, I have attention deficit disorder. Did you know it was a disease? Well at least according to the drug industry.”

Proclaiming you have ADD does what? Unless you find some kind of satisfaction for a problem of insecurity. In fact what is the point to bring forth the so-called disorder? What good does someone see in the need to tell another that he has ADD?

No I do not have such a thing called ADD. Which I quite don’t get. This country has this annoying habit to declare itself full of disorders, only to satisfy the hungry drug companies. Anyone has Restless Leg Syndrome? (this one makes me laugh) Acid Reflex Disorder? Please, give me a break.

To which I responded:

It’s not pride, per se, that leads me to dub myself as ADD, but a kind of ju jitsu. All those years reading the teacher’s comments on my report card — “poor impulse control” is one of the best — leads to a kind of reverse pride in my accomplishments, despite my inability to sit still in math class.

I don’t drug myself for it, because for what I have there are no drugs.

I wrote a piece not too long ago about US entrepreneurialism being closely linked to the hypomanic psychological profile, those restless, curious, inveterately optimistic types who fearlessly thrown themselves off the cliffs to start-up new companies (see here)

I opined that the genetic predisposition toward hypomania is likely associated with immigration: the same psychological orientation as entrepreneurs. So maybe the reason we talk so much about ADD in the States, rather than Europe, is the immigration patterns work that way. All the hypomanics lit out for the territories, and left the calm, collected, and passive types back in the villages of Europe.

Today, I picked up a link from Doc Searls about Health Problems Related to the Geek Lifestyle. Doc was groaning about poor sleep hygeine, but one of the other points in the list was this:

The typical geek trains their brain to be heavily focused while multitasking day after day. Is it surprising that this same brain does not do well when forced to isolate down to one task? Listening in a meeting is a very isolated, very passive event. Coding, developing, debugging — these are not passive at all. The geek brain is just not trained to sit quietly and listen.

The answer is to do what we have done: put oursleves in roles where multitasking — continuous partial attention — is a strength, not an illness. However, the math and physcis teachers of the world are not amused: even if we get A’s and a Phi Beta Kappa key (yes, I did). Hypomanics are charismatic, but drive authoritarian types like Belanger crazy (yes, he is: check his PersonalDNA. The purple = very high authoritarianism.).

It comes as no surprise that the media that we are exposed to in our youth influences the wiring of the brain. A recent study supports the idea that TV watching leads to ADHD (hypomania) in later life:

[from it’s official: tv linked to attention deficit]

A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that watching videos as a toddler may lead to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, also called ADD in UK) in later life.

TV watching “rewires” an infant’s brain, says Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis lead researcher and director of the Child Health Institute at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Seattle, Wash. The damage shows up at age 7 when children have difficulty paying attention in school.

“In contrast to the way real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, the pace of TV is greatly sped up.” says Christakis. His research appears in the April 2004 issue of Pediatrics. Quick scene shifts of video images become “normal,” to a baby “when in fact, it’s decidedly not normal or natural.” Christakis says. Exposing a baby’s developing brain to videos may overstimulate it, causing permanent changes in developing neural pathways.

“Also in question is whether the insistent noise of television in the home may interfere with the development of ‘inner speech’ by which a child learns to think through problems and plans and restrain impulsive responding,” wrote Jane Healy, psychologist and child brain expert in the magazine’s commentary.

And we are entering a world where children that could use computers and video games BEFORE THEY COULD TALK are in high school, and soon moving into the work force. These media also rewire the brain in unforeseen ways.

But don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating TV for infants. I dislike TV. I am suggesting that all media rewire us as we learn to accomodate it. And the use of computers — for whatever purpose, games, blogging, IM, whatever — is rewiring us, collectively, inevitably.

I am not driving a tractor on the lower forty, or rowing out to fish for a living. I am a computer geek, and spend hours every day fooling around with computers, typing, reading, email, IM. Of course I am wired differently after years of that. How could it be otherwise?

The results? Changes in how we perceive the world and our place in it. And this is not just small, subtle changes. They are big, and active. We are actively opting to do things differently. The manner of our adaptations are socially intrusive and disruptive: we IM in meetings, read books while others are lecturing, or look out the windows when we are supposed to be focused on the One Big Thing For Today, Or Else. Or light out for the territories. Or start a company.

6 April 2006 Permalink

A Chat with Linda Stone

I had the chance to have a conversation with Linda Stone last week, after hearing her speak at the recent O’Reilly Etech conference, as I wrote about in Linda Stone: The New Tech Millenialism:

I had the opportunity to listen to Linda Stone speak yesterday, at ETech. She is an articulate and persuasive exponent of a new tech millennialism, so much so that I really wanted to believe in her conclusions. But, in the final analysis, I don’t.

What was she proposing? Linda is well-known for coining the term continuous partial attention, trying to describe the mindset that we have adopted in the always on, 24/7, totally connected society that we are wrapped up in. Linda’s thesis is that CPA is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, CPA has evolved from our savannah-evolved ancestors’ need to constantly scan the horizon for prey and predators, even while we were weaving baskets or grooming each other in the shade of an acacia tree. It is a behavior that is deeply wired into our brains, one of the most basic of human psychological repertoires. On the other hand, CPA drains our attentiveness away from the task at hand, and thereby degrading our performance and involvement.

Perhaps because of the conclusions of that piece, Linda seemed to be trying to get me to agree with her, more so than in the typical interview I have these days. I ended that piece with this statement —

Linda’s appeal to mindfulness — to pay full attention to the people in the room with you — appears to resonate with other trends, like the Get Things Done movement. But I still don’t buy it, although I can see how it would be attractive to those who are focused on personal productivity instead of the much harder to quantify benefits of group solidarity and identity.

— so I guess Linda wanted both to make clear what she really believes and to see if we really were in agreement.

She started by trying to clarify her thoughts on continuous partial attention (CPA) stating that CPA is not the disorder that is besetting us. The disorder is ADD, she says, while CPA is — in small doses, anyway — a sensible adaptive behavior to the always-on, crazybusy world we live in. But if we surrender to CPA, we lose something significant, she maintains, and an excess of CPA means we start to live life in a crisis management mode, and any manner of dangers appear when we don’t pay attention to what is in front of us, and instead remain connected to the outside world.

In particular, Linda focused on the importance of paying attention to people as an aspect of building relationships. She talked about relationship building as one of the key benefits of staff meetings. When people turn off their phones, shut the screens of their PCs, and pay attention, she asserts that there is a different quality to the meeting, because people are incredibly responsive to the attention of others.

Still, maybe my sense of disagreement with Linda is some fundamental psychological issue. When I was chatting with her, I recalled my freshman physics class, where the professor simply talked too slow for me. This was in the early 70s so there were no laptops or sidekicks to help me while away the seemingly endless gaps between his words. So I listened to music on a pre-walkman cassette player, and read the text from my chemistry class. The professor actually came up to me after the third or fourth class, to ask me what I was up to, and I told him he spoke so slowly I was going to sleep, so I used this technique to remain — paradoxically — focused on the class. After I started to turn in A’s he stopped worrying about it.



And perhaps Linda is right, on some level, about the relationship issue: if somehow I had been able to remain laser focused on the instructor, instead of having my mind wander, we might have had some life-changing relationship emerge. Instead I opted for a relationship-reducing path, but one that led to me meeting the near-term goal of getting an A in physics, as well as in chemistry. In fact I got straight A’s that year, and made the Dean’s list, and one of the tricks I used was time-slicing at every opportunity: reading my notes over for physics whever my calculus instructor was reviewing something I had down cold already.

Maybe this is what Linda considers a sensible application of CPA, not an excessive one. But my hunch is that a lot of the stuff that I think is sensible — like IMing with colleagues about project A while on a telcon with other colleagues talking about project B — would be over the line with Linda. However, I have surrendered to the crazybusy cycle, and instead of trying to turn back the clock, I am looking for a better clock: one with more hands, running on a rate faster than seconds. I am looking for better technology to save me before I fall off the edge I am dancing on. In a post yesterday (What’s Missing: A Web 2.0 Critique), I called out for a better sort of personal/social information management tool. I know I need it, and if I do, there are millions of others out there looking for it.

Some of what Linda says seems like a request for better ettiquette surrounding social interaction in the always on world. Fine. But maybe the reason it sounds oldtimey to me is that I don’t spend my time in large corporations, in staff meetings, or the like. I am a soloist, spending most of my time connected to people remotely, and that sense of connection, however tenuous, is all that I have. I have to remain in touch with my posse, or I have nothing but myself. There is no organization backing me up.

And because of my distance from the world of big enterprise, Linda’s Four Eras model seems more of a parlor trick, or the sort of generational psycho-characterization that you find in People magazine. She suggests that in each of four generations, the basic motivations of people and their relationship to organizations have shifted [Note — I got this wrong in the previous post, where I thought there were only three generations]:

1. 1945-1965 — Institutional — The Ozzie & Harriet era, where the great majority of people believed that institutions would support us: give us jobs, protect us from harm, and create meaning in our lives. As a result, people were very loyal to the organizations they belonged to, to the point of excess, so that those that thought differently were shunned. This is the era of the mainframe.
2. 1965-1985 — Entrepreneurial Corporate — The era of self-expression, where individuals focused on their own opportunities, and less on the organization as a whole. This led to the deterioration of commitment, and hence, lessened loyalties all around. This era saw the shift from mainframes to the PC.
3. 1985-2005 — Collective Intelligence — The rise of the Internet led to a world all about connectedness, the rise of peer-to-peer technologies, and instant messaging. Paradoxically, all this connectedness leads, Stone asserts, to a narcissistic loneliness, where people are divided by the technologies that link them together.

   This is where the sociological abstraction ceases to convince, and becomes off-putting to me. I don’t buy the paradox. I believe that the Web has not apparently made us more connected, but in fact does in fact connect us. It does not naturally lead to narcissism and loneliness, but instead to the global village, with all of its plusses and minusses. And so it’s not surprising that I also fail to buy the arguments around the next era.
   
   

4. 2005-2025? — Search for Protection — An era of self-organizing groups, bottom-up work (yes, I am down with that), but in which people’s motivations are to be protected by the new organization. This is the reemergence of the organization, but in a different guise than the 50’s. Rather than willy-nilly entrepreneurialism, Stone suggests that people will transition to “scanning for opportunities” — a term I really like — and a search for belonging.

So, I find that Linda’s motivations were right on — we do have more in common in our thinking than I believed before — but I still remain convinced that on several key aspects of her world view, we differ. Perhaps because I am more ADD than her, and have spent a great deal of time as an independent crackpot outside the large corporations that molded her — Apple, Microsoft, and so on — I embrace the crazybusy lifestyle even while admitting it is addictive. I don’t believe that the next era will pivot on the need for protection, and that the “new organization” will form the basis of a sense of belonging. My sense is that looser affiliations, and more of them, will increasingly define people’s sense of self and their world of work. Yes, more bottom-up decision making and self-organizing groups; yes, more collective intelligence being harnessed rather than top-down autocratic decision making. But less, not more, loneliness. More fulfillment through connections, not narcissism.

Linda’s final comments, though, resonate with me: she suggests that a company’s DNA is based on the era they were “born,” or founded. So Microsoft is a child of an earlier era, and that explains why it is having so much trouble accomodating this era, where Google is reveling in it. Microsoft is the new IBM.

And if we want to see how to operate in the world that is coming, Linda and I agree totally: look to the next generation of kids, since they will be the best at whatever adaptation is most critical for success in the world ahead. I guess I will have to start playing World of Warcraft, and buy a sidekick.

[Note: Linda will be presenting at the upcoming Collaboration Technology Conference 2006, where I am serving on the program committee. Be there!]

[Photo courtesy of James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media

4 April 2006 Permalink

Instant Messaging in Literature: Part 1

I bought a paperback in the airport the other day, a new page turner by W.E.B. Griffin, called By Order Of The President. Early on in the book, we meet a thoroughly-modern General, who has adopted instant messaging as a way to plow though some of the inconveniences of his meeting-cluttered life:

Having the laptop on the commanding general’s desk and on the conference table had been the idea of Command Sergeant Major Wesley Suggins.

“General, if you turn that thing on and sign on to the Instant Messenger, I can let you know who’s on the horn. You follow, sir?”

It had taken General Taylor about ten seconds to follow Suggins’s reasoning.

General Taylor often thought, and said to his inner circle, that Napoleon was right when he said “Armies travel on their stomachs,” that during World War II someone was right to comment, “The Army moves on a road of paper,” and that, he was forced to the sad conclusion, “CentCom sails very slowly through a Sargasso Sea of conferences.”

The problem during these conferences was that there were always telephone calls from important people — such as Mrs. Elaine Naylor, or the secretary of defense — for the commanding general. General Naylor always took calls from these two, but some of the calls were from less important people and could wait.

Sergeant Major Suggins usually made the decision and informed the caller that General Naylor was in conference and would return the call as soon as he could. But sometimes Sergeant Major Suggins didn’t feel confident in telling, for example, the assistant secretary of defense for manpower or someone calling from the White House that he was just going to have to wait to talk to the boss.

In that case, there were two options. He could enter Naylor’s office, or the conference room, and go to the general, and quietly tell him that he had a call from so-and-so and did he wish to take it?

The moment  the Sergeant Major entered the conference room, or the office, whoever had the floor at the mopment in the conference would stop — often in midsentence — and politely wait for the sergeant major and the general to finish.

This wasted time, of course, and prolonged the conference.

The second option — which Naylor originally thought showed great promise — was a telephone on his desk and the conference table, which had a flashing red button instead of a bell. That had been a failure, too, as the instant the button began to flash whoever was speaking stopped tlaking, in the reasonable assumption that if the general’s phone flashed, the call had to be more important than whatever he was saying at the moment.

From the beginning, the use of the laptop to announce calls had been a success. Naylor always caught, out of the corner of his eye, activity on the laptop’s screen. He then dropped his eyes to it and read, for example:

MRS N?????

Or: 

SEC BEIDERMAN?????

Or:

GEN HARDHEAD?????

Whereupon he would put his fingers on the keyboard and type:

BRT

Which meant “Be Right There,” and, further, meant that he would stand up, say, “Excuse me for a  moment, gentlemen,” and go into a small soundproof cubicle, which held a chair, a desk, and a secure telephone, and converse with his wife or the secretary of defense.

Or, in the case of General Hardhead, for example, he would quickly type:

NN. 1 HR

Which stood for “Not Now. Have Him Call Back in an Hour.”

Or:

FOWDWIIP

Which stood for “Find Out What, and Deal With It If Possible.”

General Naylor found out he could get and receive messages in this way without causing whoever had the floor to stop in midsentence and wait.

This does a great job — without the techno jargon — of explaining the value of instant messaging as a foundation for continuous partial attention. By splitting his attention in general, and occasionally accepting non-intrusive interrupts from Suggins, he and the others involved in his conferences are able to make better headway, and he is able to occasionally step out for the important calls, when he decides to. He gets to decide what is a valid request for his immediate attention. As a result, we get overall improvement in efficiency for everyone involved, including Naylor. But most importantly, efficiency across the network is improved.

Anyone interested in the ettiquette that should surround corporate use of IM should read this, and then immediately institute a sensible policy: please bring your laptops to conferences, do as described above, and turn off your cell phones.

20 January 2006 Permalink

Linda Stone at Supernova: Continuous Partial Attention Email This Entry

Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, and the person responsible for coining the term Continuous Partial Attention, gave a much discussed presentation at Supernova. I have been interested in the meme for years (see here).

I am really sorry to have missed Linda, but Nat Torkington posted a great series of notes at O’Reilly Radar. As a result, my comments rely on third party hearsay: so be it.

Her angle in the past has been to suggest that CPA is something to be resisted: an aberrant response to the pressures of remaining connected. It seems that she is moderating her tone, at least a hair:

Linda Stone (as channeled by Nat Tarkington)In 1997 I coined the phrase “continuous partial attention”. For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships. We’ve stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits. We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we’re connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

We’ve been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time. Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind. Marketers humming that tune for two decades now.

Now we’re over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.

CPA as coping mechanism? I maintain that continuous partial attention is an inbuilt aspect of socialized online existence. Linda suggests that CPA is about maximizing opportunities and network connection, but I believe that its a means to understand the world through connection. We rely on our social connections to alert us to what’s important, what’s hot, what’s worth reading. And then, she states that this is all just a dreadful ruse, anyway, since in the end we are left “over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.”

The alternative to CPA is to revert back to an industrial age, one-thing-at-a-time approach to dealing with the world. That model is fine for supermarket checkout lines, but fails catastrophically in other settings, like hospital emergency rooms.

Continuous partial attention is a meaningful accomodation to the possibilities inherent in operating within the context of a social confederation of other minds, linked through social tools. When examined from the perspective of individual productivity — how many words, widgets, sales have you produced per month — CPA is negative. But in the social universe, you have to measure the productivity of all the connceted members, and productivity of the whole — I maintain — goes up as a function of connectedness. I am willing to slow my roll to answer your question, which allows you and your group to make progress, and you will take my IM the next day, helping me get unstuck on a problem. Someone alerts me to a product announcement, and takes a minute to tell me why they think it’s important: I willingly accept the interrupt, even though it might be thirty minutes before I get back to what I was doing.

To some extent, the question is “what is the highest good?” Is it better to complete the task in hand, or to accept an interrupt? This is contextual, to a great extent: if you are performing brain surgery, the answer is one thing, but if you are updating a project plan, and it’s Stowe on the phone with a question, your answer could be quite different.

The is a real balancing act going on with CPA: we can’t remain sane if we run in circles everytime the leaves move, but we need to be constantly scanning the horizon for prey or predators. And we have to trust the intuition that emerges from the social network. I think that Linda’s sense of unfillment — or her belief that we are — is something like the mythic yearning for a former golden age. She elaborated on her notion of Ages of Attention:

We’re shifting into a new cycle, new set of behaviours and motivations. Attention is dynamic, and there are sociocultural influences that push us to pay attention one way or another. Our use of attention and how it evolves is culturally determined.

I see twenty year cycles. Coming through in the cycles is a tension between collective and individual, and our tendency to take set of beliefs to extreme then it fails us and we seek the opposite.

1945-1965: organization/insitution center of gravity. We paid attention to that which we serve. Lucy paid full attention to phone conversations, Seinfeld does not. Belief that by serving insitution of (marriage|employer|community) we’d leave happy and well-ordered lives. Marketing, command-and-control lifestyle, parents and authority figures, all fit in. Service to institution would bring us satisfaction. We paid full-focus attention to that which served the institution: family, community, marriage. We trusted experts in authority to filter the noise from the signal, to give us the information that matters. As those things failed us, we embraced what we’d suppressed.

1965-1985: me and self-expression. Self and self-expression new center of gravity. Trusted ourselves, entrepreneurial. Apple, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines. Marketers said we have our power to be our best. Fashion broke free. We paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Paid attention to full-screen software like Word and Excel. Willing to fragment attention if it enhanced our opportunity. Multitasking was an adaptive. Our sense of committment dropped: rising divorce rate, 3 companies/career, etc. Became narcissistic and lonely, reached out for network.

1985-2005: Network center of gravity. Trust network intelligence. Scan for opportunity. Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel alive. ADD is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn’t motivated by productivity, it’s motivated by being connected. MySpace, Friendster, where quantity of connections desirable may make us feel connected, but lack of meaning underscores how promiscuous and how empty this way of life made us feel. Dan Gould: “I quit every social network I was on so I could have dinner with people.”

Her 1945-1965 characterization could go much further back. Ronald Ingelhard’s sociological explorations showed that modern day people were rejecting the large organizations that they had formerly found safety and self-identification through, and that people demanded true voice — unmediated participation in the world. This territory has been deeply mined by Shoshanna Zuboff in the Support Economy (see my discussion, here).

And then, the Summer of Love came along: 1965-1985. According to Linda and Time magazine: the Me generation. But this may be better characterized, once again, as the rise of true voice, the period when the old institutions failed to retain our interest, and people’s self-identity become increasingly disassociated from institutions. Note, however, that there was no Internet, and people had the option of ‘tuning out’ the broadcast media and ‘dropping out’ from institutions, but only the grassroots means to recreate a social order from the bottom up: no social tools, though. I was teargassed at the Capitol, marching against the Vietnam War, so I remember that era fairly well.

And then, Stone’s ‘network center of gravity’: 1985 - 2005. She suggests that we have donned continuous partial attention like bellbottom pants, a faddish reaction to the zeitgeist arising from a networked age. And that we have tried them on — along with flings with Friendster and other null experience social networking apps — and now are turning away from all that froth. To… what?

So now we’re overwhelmed, underfulfilled, seeking meaningful connections. iPod as much about personal space as personalized playlists. Driving question going from ‘what do I have to gain?’ to ‘what do I have to lose?’ Success turning to fear.

Attention captured by marketing messages and leaders who give us a sense of trust, belonging in a meaningful way. Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc.

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Hmmm. I don’t buy it. First of all, I don’t believe the characterization of being unfulfilled. People are overwhelmed with information, if they operate on an information basis: too many RSS feeds, too many channels, too many choices. That leads to anxiety, yes. But there is never too much meaning, too much insight, too much understanding. So shifting over to a socialized means of filtering the world instead of the information model decreases anxiety: I trust those that I am connected to to help me make sense of the world. And for that to work, I must adopt a communitarian attitude: my time is truly not my own. It is a shared space, a commons in which I interact with my buddies, where we live.

This does not require a return to full attention, one-thing-at-a-time processing of the world. Yes, you rely on trust — trusted contacts — but Linda seems to suggest that we will be able to leave the filtering to others: to trust concierges, protectors, leaders. Personally, I don’t want to yeild sense making to leaders any more.

Despite her millennial appeal to the world weary baby boomers, Linda’s Three Ages of Attention does not really work. Every generation since the advent of real-time communication, starting with the emergence of the telegraph, has become more and more connected, and continuous partial attention is a meaningful and sensible strategy for the world that bits built.

While Stone may feel that the ulimate aphrodesiac is the ability to wrap a Babble device around our entire lives and make the world go away — its a messy, messy world these days, after all — I don’t. I am approaching the ongoing social tools revolution expecting that it will lead to greater connection, deeper involvement with others, and a richer way to perceive the world, but this will continue to come as a direct correllary to my willingness to spread my attention, and to attend to many contacts. Unlike Stone, I don’t think 2005 is the cliff at the end of some 20 year era, but just another stepping stone on the path. I expect more, and more sophisticated, ways to distribute attention in the coming months and years. But then I believe we are processing meaning, not information, and that might be the central difference in our philosophies.

1 July 2005 11 Permalink