For the past year or two I’ve been an active member of a terrific listserv moderated by Trebor Scholz of the iDC (the Institute for Distributed Creativity). The list features wide-ranging discussion of a very high calibre, as many of the world’s best-known digital artists, activists, curators, scholars and critics are subscribers and occasional contributors (Bruce Stirling, Lev Manovich, DJ Spooky, etc.). Anyway, there is currently a thread on iDC that explores the idea of Continuous Partial Attention (CPA). That’s one name given to the way people manage multiple datastreams as they work, and by and large people on the list have described this condition in very negative terms. Some posts have suggested, for example, that people go ‘blank’ when they try to manage too many incoming data streams. Here’s my post to the iDC listserv from last night, responding to this thread…feel free to add your comments after reading it…js
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I’ve been giving continuous partial attention to this thread for the past few days. It has casually nagged at me as it nattered discontinuously along (listservs are 90% CPA) until just now, when, as I lay restlessly in bed giving continuous partial attention to all sorts of dreamy thoughts, I found myself focusing productively on the notion of CPA for the first time. Which, in a way, is my point. That most of the time most of us are giving attention to many different things, and managing that aggregate feed quite comfortably, and choosing to focus on one stream or another only as needed.

In fact, I’d propose that the P in CPA might more accurately be changed to Peripheral, as in Continuous Peripheral Attention. That seems to me how we live most of the time, even when we’re unplugged. (All at once sensing faces, air currents, light sources, soundscapes, memories, hopes, destinations, calculations, companions, desires, aches and pains, etc.) And I don’t see that our wide-spectrum awareness need necessarily interfere with our narrowband focus either. As an improvising musician I’m always trying to balance my focused and diffused awarenesses when I play within an ensemble. It’s a technique. A sophisticated dialogical skill. Maybe such a skill has to be mastered to maximize the soulful usefulness of connected culture, like the competing Yin and Yang energies in Tai Chi, or the Jungian anima and animus energies.

Maybe our (I say our because I believe this holds true for the vast majority of the readership of this list) resistance to CPA stems from our collective allegiance to literacy, a profound attention-focusing technology that unlike aural/oral or digital networked communication requires that peripheral attention streams be extinguished to be effective. When there’s lots of noise we find it hard to read or write meaningful texts, and that makes us nervous. We ‘blank’. (Supposedly, tho I don’t really believe in techno-blanking, at least not as something significantly different from all the other forms of ’spacing out’ we know and love/hate)

But our conflicted experiences as literate emigrants to the datasphere don’t really matter here anyway. What matters is that there is a generation of kids out there for whom reading long texts is weird, for whom writing long texts is weird, for whom literate-style one-way communication that eliminates peripheral streams is downright freaky. That’s why I’d like to think that continuous peripheral attention is a more accurate description than continuous partial attention, because the former allows for the possibility of a focused stream within that peripheral awareness, of a constructive managing of flow that transcends superficiality and/or chaos. And thus it suggests to me – in my more optimistic moments anyway – that the kids having sixteen conversations at once might be leading somewhere I’d be like to go.