Attention…Are Your Children Blackberry Orphans?
The Wall Street Journal paints a picture of Blackberry addicted, "furtive thumb typing" parents hiding in closets to check their email while their resentful, ignored children track them down. They warn, "There is a new member of the family, and, like all new siblings, this one is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, resulting in jealousy, tantrums, even trips to the therapist." OMG, not a trip to the therapist!
The WSJ consulted with mental health professionals, experts in obsessive compulsive disorder, to provide a 12-step program that skipped the, "Hi, my name is Mom and I am powerless and my life is unmanageable" part and went straight to that perennial target of parental guilt, meal time: #1 During meals, do not check email.
Some highlights of the other 11, written with all the right self help, empowerment words such as "commit to stop" and "endeavor to leave" are: Don’t hide your email habits from your family, don’t email while driving,ﾃつ when attending functions at your child’s school,ﾃつ when talking to your kids. Uh-huh….I see. Glad to have that pointed out.
Well, let me say first of all, I don’t have a Blackberry although I am frequently reviewing the possibility and the choices in PDA phones….perhaps I am only addicted to the concept of owning a Blackberry at this point and obsessed with the thought that when I finally make THE big decision, it will be a considered one. Hmmmm, maybe I do have OCD tendencies after all.
Second of all, I guess one issue I have with the WSJ article is with sentences such as these:
The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink.
Emma Colonna wishes her parents would behave, at least when they’re out in public
Still, like teenagers sneaking cigarettes behind school, parents are secretly rebelling against the rules.
….how kids are fighting back.
ﾃつ Although I admit to attention guilt when it comes to my children, I am uncomfortable with the thought that they are making the household rules, even though it feels at times as if they do; and that I am the misbehaving child because I am checking my email. Further, although I don’t feel that I am powerless, it is challenging to manage the allocation of time when there are so many demands on it simultaneously. Does that make us addicts?
ﾃつ If we just take a brief snapshot of yesterday afternoon for instance, one of my sons had to be picked up from basketball practice at 5:30 while the other one had a basketball game for me to attend that started at 5:30; at 4:15, after promising a client that I would be downtown no later than 4:15 because I would end my 3:00 call at 3:30, I was in my car driving downtown with the presentation that he needed to look at for next Thursday because I was leaving town on Sunday night through Wednesday night….and my elderly mother needs her pills at 6:30 PM; oh and both of my sons left their mobile phones, purchased ostensibly for logistic coordination not texting their friends, at home. Not complaining, it is just life. The WSJ article even acknowledges that it is a struggle to find balance and that mobile email can allow parents to attend a soccer game in the middle of the day.
The issue is really, attention,ﾃつ interruptions, and keeping up…. Linda Stone names the problem: continuous partial attention. Her definition: "To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY."ﾃつ ﾃつ In other words, everyday we are doing lots of things, but none of them as well as we would like to because nothing has our undivided attention.ﾃつ
Scott Berkun, author ofﾃつ The Art of Project Management warns in a wonderful blog post titled, Attention and Sex,ﾃつ "There isnﾃ｢竄ｬ邃｢t a single great work in the history of civilization, no novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television."
But, we are on overload. As Kathy Sierra writes, "And we’re all feeling the enormous weight of not being able to keep up. We can’t keep up with work. We can’t keep up with our social life. We can’t keep up with the industry, our hobbies, our families. We can’t keep up with current events. We’ll never read a fraction of those books on our list. And we are hurting."
Of course, this was written in a post that was called, The Asymptotic Twitter Curve. And regarding Twitter, she writes, "But email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I’m talking, of course, about Twitter." Ah,ﾃつ Twitter…where does it fit?
Linda Stone has recently set up a wikki and says,
"I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.ﾃつ ﾃつ We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.ﾃつ ﾃつ In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."ﾃつ
Kathy Sierra has a list and also suggests 43 Folders, Lifehacker and Steve Pavlina.
Scott Berkun says, " Make a list of all the things you read, check, skim, or browse every day (Include every gadget or device you use once a day). Make a second list of why youﾃ｢竄ｬ邃｢re spending your attention on them. What are you trying to achieve or feel? Rank the first list based on the second. Then cut the first list in half or by one-third and see what happens."
So, where does this leave us: Are we helpless addicts or responsible masters of our attention fate (or even, first mates)?
As an aside, Valleywag suggests other ways besides the Blackberry to "abuse" your children with gadgets…for mine: "Merry Christmas! It’s a Zune!"
Tags: Blackberry, Wall Street Journal, attention, Marianne Richmond, Scott Berkun, Kathy Sierra, 43 Folders, Lifehacker, Steve Pavlina, continuous partial attention, Linda Stone, Valleywag, Zune
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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?
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Fast Company’s July Issue asks the question… and provides the assessment to officially provide the answer to the question: Is your boss a psychopath? Now you can replace the less technical nom de guerre that you have been using to describe him/her, with the proper clinical terminology and the assessment score to support it.
Mind Hacks reported on the boss as psychopath in January in reference to a study conducted at the University of Surrey which reported that the managers they studied had higher incidences of histrionic, narcissistic, and compulsive disorders than psychiatric patients and hospitalized criminals although you will be comforted to know that the business managers scored lower on antisocial, borderline, and compulsive behavior disorders….although borderline and narcissistic behaviors are believed by many to be part of the same spectrum and difficult to distinguish between.
As an aside, Mind Hacks notes today that according to an article in US News narcissists are better able to handle trauma than the rest of us. Makes sense to me…remember what happened to the original Narcissist
Disorder is the New Order
David Wolfe wrote a post recently on Ageless Marketing headlined The Future is Disorder which sited Coca Cola, the beer business, the US auto industry, P&G, Network TV, Newspapers, Radio and the airlines as examples of disorder. That CocaCola has actually introduced a product called Coke ZERO may be all the evidence we need of the end of the world as we know it. Or maybe disorder is the new order? After all, small is the new big and the New York Times recently reported on a government-sponsored survey that found that more than half of all Americans will develop mental disorder in their lifetime under the headline, Ideas and Trends!
Hormone Spray Is Found To Bolster Trust in Others
Link: Hormone Spray Is Found To Bolster Trust in Others. According to a recent article in the Washington Post the hormone Oxytocin which is known to be activated in social relationships in animals has been found to improve trust in human relationships. An experiment conducted in Zurich found that those inhaling Oxytocin were more trusting in a financial transaction than the control group.
A positive outcome of the study would be help for those with impaired social functioning associated with personality disorders, Aspergers or Autism. The dark side was discussed by Antonio Damasio, neurobiologst and author of The Feeling of What Happens. He expressed concern that politicians and advertisers would use the trust enhancing spray to influence decisions.
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