Continuous Partial Attention

This morning I posted an article by Tom Friedman, "The
Age of Interruption", to my mailing list. A portion of the article
(which I copy below) referred to a term coined by former
Microsoft executive Linda Stone, "continuous partial
attention.". I find Stone's insight fascinating and I did some
further research on her and her development of this insight.

It seems to me that we rarely take notice of the creeping
cultural changes that technology brings -- when Laura Farlano
of NYCwireless spoke to my Wireless Technology course this
semester and showed how the Japanese use cell phones for text
messaging, matchmaking, shopping, etc., it was apparent that
"something was going on there". It, however, takes reflection
-- something we rarely do -- to see the great changes that cell
phones, instant messaging, PDAs, etc. have brought to our lifes in the
last 15 years. People constantly on the phone or checking
e-mail (as I do all the time on my Blackberry -- soon to be
Palm 700P) all the time are relatively new players in the
world and, it further seems to me that we usually do not
realize the impact that such behavior makes on our lives and
our society in general.

First an excerpt from the Friedman column,
which was written about the Amazon Rain Forest, and then a
speach by Stone;

Friedman:

As for the Internet in the rain forest, my point is this:
There is none. Yes, I had to go to the Tambopata Research
Center, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, to find it, but I can
report there is still a place with no Internet or cellphone
service. Of course, there are still many such places, but the
fact that people could use their cellphones from atop the
sacred Incan ruin of Machu Picchu, in the Andes, reminds one
that there are fewer and fewer every day.

I have to say, as a wired junkie myself, there was something
cleansing about spending four days totally disconnected. It
was the best antidote to the disease of our age, what the
former Microsoft executive Linda Stone aptly labeled
"continuous partial attention."

Continuous partial attention is when you are on the Internet
or cellphone or BlackBerry while also watching TV, typing on
your computer and answering a question from your kid. That is,
you are multitasking your way through the day, continuously
devoting only partial attention to each act or person you
encounter.

It is the malady of modernity. We have gone from the Iron Age
to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Age of
Interruption.

All we do now is interrupt each other or ourselves with
instant messages, e-mail, spam or cellphone rings. Who can
think or write or innovate under such conditions? One wonders
whether the Age of Interruption will lead to a decline in
civilization as ideas and attention spans shrink and we all
get diagnosed with some version of Attention Deficit Disorder.

I know that connectivity means productivity. But it is
possible to overdose. There is such a thing as "too
connected," and modern society is heading in that direction,
as more people at more income levels get wired. Everyone we
met in Peru had a cellphone, since Peru, like so many
developing countries, is going straight from no phones to
cellphones, skipping over land lines.

It means everyone is always "in." You're never "out." Out is
over. Maybe soon we'll have to artificially recreate "out."
Maybe soon we'll see an ad for a Four Seasons resort that
says, "We guarantee that every room comes without Internet
service."

What struck me about our Peruvian rain forest guide, Gilbert,
though, was that he carried no devices and did not suffer from
continuous partial attention. Just the opposite. He heard
every chirp, whistle, howl or crackle in the rain forest and
would stop us in our tracks and immediately identify what
bird, insect or animal it was. He also had incredible vision
and never missed a spider's web, or a butterfly, or a toucan,
or a column of marching termites.

He was totally disconnected from the Web, but totally in touch
with the incredible web of life around him. I wonder if
there's a lesson there.

(Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company)
------------------------------------------------------------

Stone's speech was given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference on March 7th of this year, The Program Description
follows and then the speech itself.

Keynote
Attention: The *Real* Aphrodisiac
Linda Stone, Former VP, Microsoft
Date: Tuesday, March 07
Time: 11:45am - 12:15pm
Location: Elizabeth Ballroom ABCD

Where has our two-decade journey of building infinite, "always
on" technological connections to each other taken us? How well
do we manage technology -- or does it manage us?

Continuous Partial Attention describes the behavior of
continuously monitoring as many inputs as possible, paying
partial attention to each. We keep what we consider to be the
highest priority contact or activity in greatest focus and
constantly scan the periphery to see if something more
important should be displacing our current top choice. Being
busy, being connected, being a live node on the network, makes
us feel alive. Or does it?! This talk explores a broader
context for how we pay attention to each other now, how we
have used our attention over the last few decades, and gives
food for thought concerning implications that result as we
consider new technologies and new interfaces.
----------------------------------------------------------

Attention: The Real Aphrodisiac
ETech Keynote by Linda Stone
7 March 2006

I'd like to check in with you all on your experience of the
anytime, anywhere, any place, always on lifestyle. If a
statement is true for you, please RAISE your hand. If a
contradictory statement is also true for you, please RAISE
your hand for that, as well.

1. When people talk to me, I really pay attention.

2. When people talk to me, I pay partial attention, so I can
be aware of other things coming upmy phone, Blackberry, other
people, and so on.

3. The way I currently use computer and communications
technologies improves my quality of life.

4. My quality of life is often compromised by technology.

5. Technology sets me free.

6. Technology enslaves me.

A principle of Aikido is that the opposite of a profound truth
is another profound truth. The criteria for a profound truth
is that it's true for everyone. We have been operating in an
increasingly noisy world and taking on the job of staying on
top of everything. We're now beginning to shiftthe world may
continue to be noisy, but, our yearning and fulfillment are
more likely to come from getting to the bottom of things, from
stillness, and from opportunities for meaningful connection.
The sweet spot of opportunity for those of us in high tech, is
the meeting of human desire and technology advance.

Unix offered talk, IM technology to the scientific community,
almost 30 years before ICQ showed up. The powerful combination
of human desire, in this case a desire to connect, and a
well-timed technology caused thousands of people to sign up
for ICQ every week.

The sweet spot of opportunity for us is the meeting of human
desire and technology advance.

What is continuous partial attention?

In 1998, I coined this phrase. I remember a time, early on,
when I talked about continuous partial attention at a
conference. Way back then, I was working in Microsoft
Research. Someone in the audience got up and very angrily
declared, "First Microsoft destroys our lives with Windows and
now Microsoft is further destroying our lives by messing with
our attention?!"

Continuous partial attention was not an evil post-Windows
Microsoft plot. It is just happening and has been happening,
building, evolving, and getting refined to a high art over
these last 20 yearsgive or take. Is it good? Is it bad? It
just IS. It helps us. It hurts us. It's an adaptive behavior
and we are actually on the way to adapting our way beyond it.

Continuous partial attention has been a way of life for many
of us. It's a post multi-tasking behavior. The two are
differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we
multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive
and more efficient. We give the same priority to much of what
we do when we multi-taskwe stir the soup, talk on the phone,
notice the great homework little Rael brought home, answer the
door, and so on. We get as many things done at one time as we
possibly can.

In the case of continuous partial attention, we are motivated
by a desire to be a live node on the network. We want to
connect, we want to effectively scan for opportunity and
optimize for the best opportunitiesactivities or peoplein any
given moment. An example of continuous partial attentionyou
are having lunch with Tim O'Reilly. Ray Ozzie calls him.
Sorry. Ray just might be the bigger opportunity for Tim in
that moment. He'll catch you when he's done. But since when
did it become acceptable to pick up the phone in the middle of
a lunch with someone? In the last 10-20 years, give or take.
Trends are slower at the beginning and then they accelerate.
Continuous partial attention became a strategy for effectively
scanning for opportunity. Didn't we used to say"I'll be at
lunch from noon to 2. How about we talk after 2?" Have you
ever been at a lunch where you picked up a call, then the
person you're lunching with picked up a call, then you never
quite got back in sync through the whole lunchyou both spent
your time together witnessing each other's phone calls?

In the all time, full out, golden days of continuous partial
attention, it was not unusual for people to enter a meeting
and spend the time emailing, sending SMS messages and, other
than a vague presence of a physical entity, the attention was
anywhere but in the physical meeting room.

In order to cope, to keep up with responsibilities and
relationships, we stretched our attention bandwidth to its
upper limits. It's as if we expected our personal bandwidth to
keep up with the ever increasing bandwidth that technology
offered. Scoblereads 1500 blogs a day. Most of the people in
this roomupwards of 350 emails a day. To pay continuous
partial attention is to keep a top level item in focus, and
constantly scan the periphery in case something more
importantto us, in that moment,emerges. Always motivated by a
desire not to miss opportunities and by a desire to be a live
node on the network. To be alive is to be busy and connected.

With every opportunity, we asked, "What can be gained here?"

Continuous partial attention fits into a larger context, a
larger set of patterns. I'll apologize in advance for making
some generalizations. Generalizations are useful and limited
at the same time.

My theory is this. We operate with a sort of collective sense
of an ideal. Some of you might recall the '60's. For a moment,
consider those years,

1965-1985 Sally Fields was the Flying
Nun, fashion ranged from mini-skirts to combat boots and
fatigues, OUR BODIES, OUR SELVES was published, Southwest
Airlines, the Gap, Apple and Microsoft were founded and male
hair seemed to be longer than ever before. It was an era of
self-expression. Me, me, me and Marlo Thomas' FREE TO BE ME.

The center of gravity was me, me, me. We trusted ourselves. We
focused on personal productivity and companies like Apple and
Microsoft gave us the "power to be our best."
Entrepreneurialism flourished. The divorce rate increasedif it
isn't good for me, why am I doing it? Mom took aerobics
classes and left little Rael milk and cookies and gave him a
key to wear around his neck so he could get into the house
after school. Children began to take an unprecedented number
of self-improvement classeskarate, music, sports, flower
arranging, tap dancingwe were all about achieving our full
potential and creating opportunities for ourselves.

We gave our full focus attention to those things that enhanced
our abilities to create opportunities for ourselves. We
multi-tasked to increase our productivity. The full screen
interfaces sported by PC and Mac applications were just dandy
in a world ruled by productivity.

From 1965-1985, that collective ideal was to value
self-expression and creativity above all else. We evolved with
this ideal as a guiding principle. Being a species skilled at
taking things to extremes, we took this ideal to an extreme
and found ourselves yearning for that which was sacrificed in
pursuit of the ideal.

In shortif you're all about self-expression, it's likely that
you will become narcissistic and lonely. It's also probable
that you would begin to yearn for what's missingin this case,
connection to others, a sense of being part of something
larger.

Welcome to 1985-2005. The era of connecting. The network is
the center of gravity. We trust network and collective
intelligence. We move from valuing productivity to valuing
communication. And communication technologies flourish.

We evolve from entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurialism with
strong alliances and affiliationseBay, Amazon. Micro-finance
models like Gramin Phone and Gramin Bank, after many, many
years, finally really took off. We played Battleships in the
'70's and we played Diplomacy in the '90's. Play dates
replaced many of the violin and dancing lessons from the
previous era. It was all about connecting and being part of a
network.

Our new new thing was scanning for opportunity. Remember how
surprised and not surprised we were when a group of successful
Yahoo! employees left stock and opportunity on the table to go
start epinions? To succeed meant to make the most of every
connection, activity, and opportunity. In the early days of
Friendster, the bar room boast was, "I have 3000 friends." It
wasn't unusual to go to a party and to see lots of people
talking on their cell phones. We were everywhere except where
we actually were physically.

For those of you who think that you are witnessing a 50 year
old's meltdown, consider thisa 20-something said to me
recently, "Linda, I quit every social network I was on so I
could actually have dinner with people." When I speak about
continuous partial attention to groups of young people, they
resonate, they beg for strategiesthey want a better quality of
life. This 24/7 thing isn't feeling so good and more and more
people want to feel better.

One clever CEO began to ask that employees disarm at the door
when they came in to meetingspeople had to drop all weapons of
communicationcomputers, phones, pagers, Blackberries, you name
it. Another CEO said, "Well, we have different types of
meetings. If it's a big meeting where information is being
presented, and you're sitting in the back, you can do email OR
pay attention. If it's a smaller meeting and we're trying to
get a decision made, laptops are closed."

This always on, anywhere, anytime, any place era has created
an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to
mammals in a state of constant crisisthe adrenalized Fight or
Flight mechanism kicks in. It's great when we're being chased
by tigers. How many of those 500 emails a day is a TIGER? Or
are they mostly mice? Is everything really such an emergency?
Our way of using the current set of technologies would have us
believe it is.

We stop breathing, except shallowly. We don't sleep well. Is
everyone here sleeping well? Blackberry under the pillow,
right?

Continuous partial attention, anytime, anywhere, any place
technologies, the era of connect, connect, connect, is
contributing to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and a
sense of being unfulfilled.

Another pendulum shift is inevitable. Due to the 24/7, on, on,
on lifestyle, new desires are beginning to surface.

Everything in nature that works seems to have a cyclethe life
cycle of a plant, the seasonssummer, fall, winter, spring.
Athletes train with cycles in mindcycles of high performance,
cycles of different types of workouts, periods of rest. Always
on doesn't respect this. And if there is no winter, there is
also no spring.

At the moment, we use every technology at our disposal to
communicate or to make ourselves easily accessible to be
communicated to.

Take Emaila communication technology of choice used for every
type of communication. Consider how effective email is for
decision making or for crisis management. NOT. Yet, it's still
used for those types of communicationeven after all these
years. WHY? It's OUR opportunity to come up with new
technologies that are better for that or to, at least, stop
using email in situations where it's such a poor match.

Wikis are better for brainstorming. I.M. is better for making
a plan. Telephones and IM may be better for crisis management.

Communication ranges from synchronous to asynchronous and from
high bandwidth/resolution to low bandwidth/resolution. Every
type of communication from conflict resolution to crisis
management to planning to information sharing falls most
naturally somewhere on that grid. Conflict resolution is best
done synchronously and in high bandwidth (eg, face to face).
Crisis management is best done synchronously at any bandwidth
from high to low. Information sharing can easily be done
asynchronously, and often in low bandwidth.

With dangerous tools, like power saws and chipper shredders,
we get instructions on how to use them without hurting
ourselves and others. Is it time for some guidelines on
how/when/where each of these communication technologies is
best used? Email is an attention chipper shredder.

We have so many powerful technologiesmany of these, thanks to
the alpha geek genius gathered in this room. And at the same
time as we celebrate these powerful technologies, we feel
increasingly powerless in our lives.

Which is why, just as we made a shift from productivityall
about meself-expression in 1965-1985 to connect, connect,
connect and the network as the center of gravity from
1985-2005, we are on the edge of the next shift. And a new set
of opportunities.

Connect, connect, connect has brought us to a place where we
feel overwhelmed, over-stimulated and unfulfilled.

We want protection, we want more filtering, we want a sense of
meaning and belongingthis is the pendulum shift that emerges.
These qualities characterize the products and services we
want, the marketing messages that resonate with us and the
types of leaders and corporate cultures that engage us. We
have gone from an era of creating opportunity in 1965-1985 to
scanning for opportunity in 1985-2005, to now, discerning
opportunity in 2005-2025. We have gone from asking what do I
have to gain to asking what do I have to lose?
Protection and Filtering

We want to protect and be protected. We want to sort through
noise effectively to find signal. We want Tivo. We want to
wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to
BLOCK out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all
that noise. We want to trust that Google is giving us the MOST
relevant information we need. We want to trust that the
politicians are going to protect us. Oops. Still working on
that one. But if they "seem" like protectors, in some cases,
that's enough for them to get elected. We want to TRUST the
companies we buy from. The marketing messages and the
companies that work for us evoke feelings of trust, of
protection.
Meaning and Belonging

People (eg, Technorati) are starting to talk about networks of
interconnected communitiesa little more manageable than the me
and the rest of the world network we've been mixing with.

Whether it's products or services, recruiting strategies,
leadership, marketing or coporate cultures, we will
increasingly be inclined to resonate with messages of meaning,
belonging, protection, and trust.
Discernment

Discerning opportunitywhat do we REALLY need and want to pay
attention to? Attention IS our scarcest and most valuable
resource. What we do with our attention defines us.

For the last two decades, give or take, ease of use has been
the mantra of every technology columnist, every product
manager in every high tech. company. It's good. But it's no
longer good enough.

The new mantra, the new differentiator, the new opportunity
for all of us is: improves quality of life. Does this product,
service, feature, messageenhance and improve our quality of
life? Does it help us protect, filter, create a meaningful
connection? Discern? Use our attention as well and as wisely
as we possibly can?

Dee Hock, back in 1996, said:

* Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
* Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent
whole, which can be related to other information.
* Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other
information in a form useful for making decisions and
determining actions.
* Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other
knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and
acting.
* Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose,
ethics, principles, memory and projection.

Seems to me, our opportunity is to move from being knowledge
workers to becoming understanding and wisdom workers.

Quality of life: the new benchmark.

Thank you for your attention.

(2005, O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

A "Fair Use Notice" was published with the original mailing
and its terms apply here -- For more information