Robert Scoble, Attention,Get a Life, Which Life
So, if I hadn’t been working on Saturday night (Get a life) and didn’t suffer from advanced, possibly chronic continuous partial attention I wouldn’t have tuned into Techmeme on a Saturday night and read the news by way of Silcon Valley Watcher:" Microsoft’s top blogger Robert Scoble is leaving…."
Well, that news has been well dissected today from its meaning in the blogosphere at Diva Marketing to what it means for Microsoft at Randy Holloway Unfiltered to a focus on starting something, not leaving at Cruel to be Kind. The range of blog posts are well organized at Techmeme.
To me, the news highlighted some other related concepts that are being discussed on line. One is, of course the concept of attention and/or continuous partial attention that led to my awareness of the Scoble news; and the other one is identity: digital life/real life. Attention, and my own frustrations with it, is a topic that I have written about before. The last time, I included a promise to pay more attention. Liz Strauss did the same, but I think she is doing better at it since she is writing about tools, organization and backing up files and I am still writing about attention.
Returning to the behavior that this post started with, its Saturday night and I am working, and instead of attending fully to the task at hand, I multi-task my way to techmeme; this moves to the other issue: digital life vs real life. Joshua Porter at Bokardo has been writing about, "The non-collision of relationship and independent George." George? George from Seinfeld. And this provides a feedback loop in and of itself because Seinfeld is one of my 15 year old son’s favorite TV shows and he frequently asks me to watch it with him and although I frequently do, I frequently don’t; yes, he is asking for attention and he is not getting it.
Bokardo’s uses the intersection of George as defined as someone in a relationship versus George as just George meet. Bokardo’s point is about our digital lives on our blogs, email, aggregators vs our real lives and is there a difference in our identities between the two. If we believe that there are two of us, or two or more of us.
He references Nicolas Carr at Rough type who writes, "When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.†In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities.â€
Carr’s concerns is that as we provide our lives as content on MySpace and YouTube and involve ourselves in the lives of others we are becoming "digital narcissists" and he quotes Scott Karp who writes,
"This is why MySpace can’t effectively monetize its 70 million users through advertising — people use MySpace not to GIVE their attention to something that is entertaining or informative (which could thus be sold to advertisers) but rather to GET attention from other users. Why is it so appealing to MySpace users to be able to post messages publicly on other users’ sites? Because they can GET attention as a function of GIVING it."
Bokardo believe that " the dichotomy of a “digital life†being somehow different from our “real life†is becoming more false every day. Not only do people understand how web technologies work, but they’re leveraging them to improve all parts of their lives." This is illustrated well at Toby Bloomberg’s Blogger Stories.
So, what about the intersection of digital life vs real life? Well we are both products of our environment and producers of our environment, online as well as off line. The self is a social product of the dynamic interaction between ourselves and our environment( social cognition theory, symbolic interactionism) and human interaction is dynamic process of reciprocal role-taking.
Technology has made our interactions with "others" significantly different than originally imagined by the pre Internet. theorists in that "others" is merely a much larger group and a much more self-selected group.We are not limited by proximity and therefore have much more control over our interactions. The first modern technology driven change was with the advent of television and "old media." Media social influences were "symbolic" role models and influencers and communication was one way.
Next technology enabled two way interaction on blogs and social networks, on an expanded level so that our environment has expanded exponentially. Now, not only are we able to interact online with an expanded environment, we are producing and starring in entertainment content on places like YouTube in a world where everyone’s lives can be viewed as a TV sitcom or a drama. Digital narcissism? Of course; a natural progression from confessions on Oprah and my tragedy, my best seller.
Another point to consider is made by Anne Zelenka. We have different roles for different aspects of our lives; our identity is fluid whether online or off. Our identity is contexual isn’t it? We are parents, children, spouses, employees, teachers and students all in the same day and as Goffman says we play parts during our daily performances.
So, here is the point where attention meets identity in this story. I would have continuous partial attention regardless of technology; technology enabled access to information has only provided more choices. Multi-tasking is a way of life for me; part of my identity. It lead me to the Scoble news late Saturday night. I don’t know Robert Scoble other than through his blog and his book.But, by virtue of his identity in the blogosphere, I thought it was noteworthy and passed it along. Which made me start thinking about identity. This was big news in one corner of my life, on line. In the offline corner it was non-news. Hey kids, Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft! Robert who?
Tags: Identity, Robert Scoble, MySpace, YouTube, Toby Bloomberg, Anne Zelenka, Nicholas Carr, Joshua Porter, Liz Strauss, Attention, Continuous partial attention, logs, social networks
Attention: Giving It and Getting It
Dave Pollard writes in How to Save the World that "What people seek from others more than anything else, is attention and appreciation." He references an earlier post where he wrote, "It’s really all about attention, and paying attention. The attention we pay to others, and that others pay to us, defines us, far more than our appearance or our name. And how can we appreciate what someone (a life partner, a business partner, a customer, an employee, a friend or foe is about and has to offer) unless and until we pay attention to her, really listen and observe with (as much as is humanly possible no judgment, no personal filters or frames impeding. And once we’ve paid enough attention that we really understand that person (or for that matter, that creature of any species), how can we not appreciate her….watch, listen, observe, pay attention and you will know the reason."
I couldn’t agree more and I couldn’t practice it less. Just ask my children.
And of course I have a million excuses and explanations for this but that doesn’t change the outcome which is that the people that I care most about don’t get my full attention and therefore do not feel appreciated. Linda Stone coined the term "continuous partial attention" in 1997 and described it as a way of life for the past two decades in order to keep up with responsibilities and relationships. She says, "With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." She doesn’t mention the outer edge of continuous partial attention when the top level item is so constantly shifting that there really is no way to distinguish between the top level and the periphery. I think you have to be a single mother with adolescent sons to experience that.
Newsweek covering the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that had as its theme the Attention Economy says that "carrying a BlackBerry is admitting that your commitment to your current activity is only partial." Linda Stone, Newsweek noted, draws a line between the benefits of perpetual contact through email, IMs, text messages and so on to the overloaded contact that puts us in a place of constant crisis; where continuous partial attention becomes distraction and we can’t make a commitment to any one thing. She describes continuous partial attention as being motivated by our need to be connected which is enabled by the technologies of connection; we meet a friend for lunch and during that hour we talk to others on our cellphone, eat, email, and answer text messages. We are busy, we are scanning. We don’t have a clue. There is no meaning . It is noise not music.
Edward Hallowell, who is the co-author of Driven to Distraction the first book to, if nothing else make us feel okay about attention deficit disorder (ADD) has declared that there is an epidemic of attention deficit disorder. He has written a new book called CrazyBusy Overstretched,Overbooked, and About to Snap - Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.
He uses the name attention deficit trait (ADT) to describe the condition when we get overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize. Hallowell offers some solutions to "multi-tasking mania" such as allowing for 30 minutes a day for thinking or relaxing and to take time to connect to other people without your mobile device or laptop. I think we all know what we should do…what we don’t know is how to do it. Furthermore, we don’t have time to read his book. Note to Hallowell: Please write a blog so I can read that.
Research has shown that mulitasking reduces productivity. Research conducted by Joshua Rubenstein, PhD.indicates that task switching is counter productive and can even be dangerous when we don’t realize the limitations of our attention. As a matter of fact, Seth Greenberg, a professor at union College, says that "current cognitive models suggest that people have a limited amount of attention available at any moment…Attention can be thought of as a fuel that can be dispersed. Thus tasks can be performed simultaneously with efficiency as long as the required attention for both tasks does not exceed the limit." In other words, attention divided cannot stand….do more accomplish less.
So…back to the issue of giving and getting attention. My kids will ask me to, for instance, watch a TV show with them and say and "you have to come in here" which means without my laptop. Kathy Sierra wrote a post called Your Brain on Multitasking and says that the solution is to just give things your undivided attention, to be mindful and do one thing at a time. In a more recent post she states, Multi-tasking Makes Us Stupid. Well, ok then…that is settled. Who wants to be stupid? I’ll turn off the computer, not answer the phone, not read, or otherwise not give you and the TV my undivided attention. Maybe we can even skip the TV part.
Scott Berkun really summed it up in an attention titled post, Attention and Sex. He writes, "Your obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable things on your cell phone or laptop. Instead it’s the intimate, deep moments that refuse division that matter." He goes on to set an attention value proposition: "how we spend our attention changes the value of what we spend it on." His analogy, "if you only spend a fast food amount of attention, you will never have a 5 star dining experience" puts it all into perspective. I think this means, be mindful.
Last week we received an email about the death of a student who was a class ahead of my older son. The kids got out of school for spring break on Thursday, March 17th. That night he was the passenger in a SUV that flipped over and he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. I need to give my children much more of my undivided attention. We would all benefit and no doubt be more focused on our tasks knowing that attention was a continuous whole, not a continuous partial. I agree with Dave Pollard, that the attention and the appreciation that we give defines us and my definition right now is lacking.
Technorati Tags: attention, continuous partial attention, ADD, ADHD, multi-tasking
Passion versus Obsession
A client was recently expressing her concern that her adolescent son may have Aspergers. He is and always has been a computer genius or computer nerd, depending on who is describing him, with a few friends that have similar interests. She and her husband are very social people which makes their son’s personality all the more striking in its contrast to theirs. He has one official diagnosis, ADD, and is medicated for that. Other than ADD, he is an adolescent which probably should be a pathology all of its own to define the narcissistic, angry years that begin around 13 and end around 20. Or so I am told. Over the years, they have consulted with many mental health professionals. Currently, the combination of adolescence, stimulant medication, his temperament and personality are expressing some very unpleasant behaviors. Aspergers keeps rearing its head as they consult with psychiatrists, neurologists, therapists and counselors.
The issues pointing at Aspergers are the lack of basic social skills, the inability to decode social signals, lack of eye contact, and conversations that about narrowly defined, highly technical interests. However, the last doctor that they saw said that he thought "everyone" at the medical school had Aspergers.
And we have all heard others say that "everyone" in Silicone Valley including "you know who" has Aspergers.
In thinking about this, I wondered about the difference between being considered passsionate about say, computers or being considerered obsessed with them. Or medicine, or whatever the narrowly defined highly technical interest might be. If the interest is "highly technical" maybe we say obsession. If the interest is not technical, such as a sport, maybe we say, passionate?
Of course one of my favorite blogs is Creating Passionate Users which is written by some very technical people….who write engaging, passionate posts most recently about the developmental stages of companies. What do you think about passsion versus obsession?
ADD Parents
The Myomancy Blog posed an interesting question today regarding parenting and ADD: "Do you have ADHD style behaviors that you can learn to control and do you need to improve your own parenting skills?"
An article from Attention Research Update indicated that a study conducted EJ Harvey and reported in the Journal of Attention Disorders had shown that parents with ADD symptoms found it difficult to be consistent in enforcing rules and consequences and had an overly permissive parenting style. Of course all children do better with consistency in rules and consequences but for ADD kids structure, rules, and consistency are critical….unfortunately since ADD is highly heritable there is a high liklihood that their ADD parent is not going to provide much of it.
So….to all of us ADD parents with ADD kids: put the oxygen mask on ourselves first! Get organized, set schedules, make lists, write down rules and consequences for breaking them. Everyone in the household will benefit.
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