Attention, Partial Attention, Starving For....

Linda Stone stands up to the podium and we learn that five people in the audience are comparative literature majors. Who knew?

She talks of continuous partial attention, which she coined awhile back, what it means in today's world and how what's happening relates to existing and upcoming services and products.....

Says Linda, "We've stretched our attention span to the limits. We seem to think we can keep up with increasing bandwidth......but we really feel alive when we feel connected to others."

Yes yes yes I'm sitting there thinking. But is LinkedIn really being connected to others. It's starving me of quality time with people on that very network and this is only one of many I'm involved with. I can hardly keep up and I'm not alone. Yet, we continue to 'scan' for 'connection' opportunities in our lives.

Between the expanding need to always network and be 'always on,' we are swimming.....no sinking in a stream of just too much damn information.

Apparently e-mail free Fridays are starting to become a trend in the UK. Once again, the Brits have it right. The idea is to see if banning emails for a day increases employee creativity. With a billion emails being sent each day worldwide and growing, its no wonder that there's an increased inability to focus.

Instead of acting upon a decision, it gets delayed or gets forwarded to someone else to handle.

She refers to a David Kirkpatrick article (Fortune), where they interview Gates on Microsoft meetings. Says Gates, "there are three types of meetings at Microsoft."

--free for all
--one where people have to pay attention, if you sit in the back, you're only partially there.
--if you're at the table, you have signed up for 100% participation and....attention.

Linda continues...."Attention is not a static thing. It's dynamic."

Then there's multi-tasking. Ah yes, women are so fabulous at multi-tasking and yet the degree at which I am forced to multi-task has doubled since I worked 'corporate' a little over five years ago. Overall, our sense of commitment has deteriorated. (not just professionally I would add).

There's been twenty years of 'its all about me.' While 9/11 and an increased trend towards taking care of family has added to less 'me,' it's still more 'all about me' in this country than it was a generation ago.

I loved this part - "when you're narcissist and lonely, you tend to reach out to a network." Fabulously put and so true. So the population now reaches out more than ever....we reach out to whatever network is available, whatever is out there - flickr, linkedin, friendster, match.com, yahoo - you name it. There's no shortage of them and we're grabbing at them frantically as the need to connect increases.

She claims, "being connected to our network is a post multi-tasking adaptive behavior," and continues to talk about the past versus today and the future. "Last decade, technology was an aphrodesiac." If this is true, "what will the new aphrodesiac be?" Answer? Committed Attention, Intention and Focus.

Clearly, we need tools and services that will filter signal from noise. We have an opportunity today to "build" technologies that will enable us (humans) to take the power back. Why? I think its because we've gone so far with the last decade's aphrodesiac that we have forgotten what its like to be human and to have real human interaction. Do you know how many times I'm at a conference and someone is standing in front me talking to me WHILE they're looking down at their Blackberry. Why bother?

We all want to enhance the quality of our lives and frankly, technology isn't doing it, at least not for me. It enslaves me.

Says Glenn Reid of Five Across, "Humans are filtering things out. We're not building interconnected networks, the way we connect people to each other. Boing Boing is a filter for example; the original content isn't the compelling part but the human or blog filter to save us time from finding the interesting content on the web."

Adds Technorati's Dave Sifry, "what we mostly lack is time. Quality time. We only have 24 hours in a day and that time is increasingly becoming fundamentally scarce. What if you could start to use the same kind of analysis that we use on the stock market today and apply that to where our attention is going? Computers can capture the information; if you could then enable your device to analyze and tell you how you're really spending your time, we can do some interesting analytics....then, you can get others to direct and refocus your attention based on that analysis."

And on Google and its value? Hyperlinks are a vote of attention and a new forum of social gesture. What if you can track that information and allow people to act as filters? We are already doing that today and its increasing.

Linda is concerned however -- 'perhaps we over analyze and apply too many analytics.' Yet, at the end of the day, its a lifestyle choice and we all need to make the right choice to achieve balance. We have to identify what's truly important in our own lives and get re-focused..... Internet or no Internet.

We seem to have surrendered to those opportunities instead of just taking the time to BE with people.

We start to hear about and discuss data and what that means....people collect data because they can.

Says Steve Gillmor, "your metadata goes in but never comes back out." People don't truly own their own data today. Adds Sifry, "If I want to store my data, that's fine, but we should all own our own data. If I easily need to access my data out and transfer it elsewhere, I should be able to do that." Especially around attention.

Such as..... how I spend my time, the books I read, the items I order online, my preferences on Amazon or Google. If I want to share that data, I should be able to, if I want them private, I should also have that choice. We should be able to use preferences the way we want to, i.e., allow a trusted group of people to access some of our data but not all of it.

Says Linda, "I'd like an increased focus on explicit information. Our authenticity is in the implicit aspects. We need to balance the implicit and the explicit."

See next blog post for a photo recap.