Overload, Shmoverload

I gave a talk at the recent Etel conference, and I have subsequently decided to post the preso under a new name. The O'Reilly organizers had offered up "Communications Overload" way back when, and a few weeks ago -- before putting my thoughts and slides together -- I had asked them to change the name to "Communications Underload: A Contrarian Approach" which they did.

After the thoughts I struggled with in the few past days, and the experience of actually presenting the talk (it was not so much a workshop as a ridiculously long talk), I am going to rename the materials as "Overload, Shmoverload".

I wish I has an audio of the preso. I think I will do that in the future. For the moment though, here's an (inadequate) pdf of the preso. Here's a SlideShare of the preso:

What did I talk about? A few points:

• We don't really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted by Nobel laureates (Herbert Simon - "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."), best-selling business book authors (Tom Davenport and John Beck - "The scarcest resource for today's business leaders is no longer just land, capital, or human labor, and it certainly isn't information. Attention is what's in short supply."), or high tech self-help gurus (Linda Stone - continuous partial attention). It may the several related cognitive centers, but at any rate, modern psychology/cognitive science hasn't figured it out.
  
• My guess: most of what people say about attention is hogwash: mere anecdotes, or flimsy cultural norms offered up in a 'be productive, be happy' wrapper.
  
• Whenever business thinkers seek to apply an economic metaphor to human cognition, it is a mess: remember "knowledge management"?
  
• Attention -- whatever it really is -- is not an economic factor, like the price of gas. It is not a resource: it is not fungible. It can't be bought, sold, or created.
  
• Are we being driven crazy by Toffler's Information Overload? Is the ADD epidemic a result of information cracking our kids?
  
• We are transitioning to a new ethos, in which remaining connected to those most important to us is more imporant (and more valuable, in the final analysis) than personal productivity. This seems counterintuitive, since people talk about time stress the way that people in the agricultural era talked about backache. But the productivity of the network -- those that matter to you -- is more important than the piecework in your lap.
  
• We have to spand more time scanning the horizon -- keeping up with all your friends' status updates on Twitter, reviewing the newest posts on techmeme, etc. -- than people used to, because the rate of change has increased. The hypothetical value of focusing on one thing and getting it done as quickly as possible has decreased.
  
• We are switching to a time in which the dominant mode will be flow, not focus.
  
• How do jugglers juggle? They don't focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.
  
• In an era of flow you can ignore things that don't look threatening or critical. Important stuff will be signalled in a bunch of ways: critical breaking news stories will show in Twitter tweets, RSS, emails, IM. But you can just ignore transient stuff. That's why etiquette around IM has to be based on 'it's ok to ignore IMs' because otherwise it becomes a chore demanding foreground attention.
  
• Don't listen to industrial era or information era (the last stage of industrial-ism) nonsense about personal productivity. Don't listen to the Man.
  
• The network is mostly connections. The connections matter, give it value, not the nodes.
  
• Flow Strategies: (yes, I offered some cheap advice)
  
  1. Time is a shared space -- your time is truly not your own
     
  2. Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity
     
  3. Everything important will find it’s way to you many, many times: don’t worry if you miss it
     
  4. Remain in the flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention
• The way we think of time colors everything:
  • Physics time: part of the fabric of the universe -- this is how physicists make sense of things, but not relevant for us, really.
    
  • Linear (Industrial) time: Kant/Leibnitz shaped the western notion of time as something we are passing through -- this is a recent invention, and underlies undustrial era notions of progress.
    
  • Cyclical (Mystical) time: time as the unending moment -- limited to transcendent moments for most of us who are not yet enlightened.
    
  • Flow (Lived) time: we are in the unending moment through which everything flows -- Piaget and others have noted that time dliates: sometimes it goes fast, sometimes it zooms. When you are in the zone, the tennis (base, soccer, basket) ball seems to slow down and there is plenty of time to get into the right position, without consciously thinking of it.
• The New Balancing Act: "For the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps"
  

Looks like a book struggling to be written. Down, boy.

tags: continuous+partial+attention, flow, traffic+and+flow, overload+shmoverload, information+overload, oreilly+etel, linda+stone, tom+davenport, herbert+simon, john+beck, attention+economy, lifestreaming

Comments

[Craig Roth]

Good thoughts. A few clarifications though.

Stowe Boyd: We don't really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted …It may the several related cognitive centers, but at any rate, modern psychology/cognitive science hasn't figured it out.
Craig Roth: You guessed right! I recommend anyone interested in the psychological aspects of attention look at Posner and Petersen’s paper. Their study of the how the brain processes attention by found that the brain uses a network of anatomical areas of the brain. “The attention system of the brain is anatomically separate from the data processing systems ... It interacts with other parts of the brain, but maintains its own identity.” It also found that separate subsystems are involved in maintaining attention, just as in the decentralized architecture model described previously. “It is neither the property of a single center, nor a general function of the brain operating as a whole … divide the attention system into subsystems that perform different but interrelated functions. (a) orienting to sensory events; (b) detecting signals for focal (conscious) processing; (c) maintaining a vigilant or alert state.”

SB: We are switching to a time in which the dominant mode will be flow, not focus.
CR: I’m not in the camp that says the huge amount of information now available is “bad”. I agree that we will adapt. But I don’t think a move away from focus is what will happen either. How did we adapt when the number of TV channels we received jumped from 3 to 150? We’ve learned to pick out (“focus on”) the programs we want to see and ignore the rest. Trying to absorb even a small portion of the flow of cable channels out there would render one senseless in short order.

SB: How do jugglers juggle? They don't focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus:
CR: I think there’s a lesson here, but “unfocus” isn’t it. If you want to learn how to juggle, I don’t think unfocusing will get you there. I think practicing a real lot until its pure motor memory is how you’d do it. I think the way jugglers juggle is to get their juggling down so well that they can do it without thinking. I’m guessing – I don’t juggle. But I do play guitar and I know that you have to get a song down pat before you can start watching the rest of the band and the audience and having fun with it. That doesn’t help much for enterprise attention management though since, as boring as being present in a conference call may be, I don’t think autonomic responses will help much.

[Audrey]

I've been thinking about this for a few days now. I think you're right that the problem of communication overload may be overstated. The raw contents of my feed reader are beyond what I have time for if I read every post, but that's not actually how I work. I read for content the way I did with school textbooks, not focusing on individual words but looking for the main pieces. And I use filters to focus on the content I need right now. And when I really want to pay attention to something, I close or turn off any potential distractions. This is learnable.

[Pete Quily]

Hi Stowe,

very interesting article. Here's a few comments on your slide 12 attention deficit disorder, or as I often like to call it Attention Surplus Condition, we don't have a deficit of attention, we often have too much of it. This is from my perspective as an Adult ADD coach who has ADD.

Inability to focus
Not exactly, if they're interested in something ADDers can hyperfocus like a laser for hours. ADD is a problem when you have to focus on things you're not interested in, something that's hard for everyone, but several times harder for low dopamine ADDers.

Hyperactivity
Some ADDers are hyperactive some, while some (esp. women) have the inattentive form with no hyperactivity. As ADDers become adults, the physical hyperactive symptoms tend to diminish and transform to mental restlessness.

Treated (paradoxically) with stimulants
True. Also treated with SSNI (Strattera), and sometimes antidepressants (Wellbutrin)

Is our culture creating ADD in children? Linked to video games,watching television, etc.

Those were pretty flawed studies. See http://adultaddstrengths.com/2006/03/14/adhd-not-caused-by-tv-study-shows/

Using video games, TV, and the internet are more examples of self medication for ADDers than causes of it.

Not that TV is good for you, but it won't cause ADD. ADD is the number 2 genetically inherited condition (80%). Height is #1. Fathers who have ADD usually take longer to get out of denial about it than mothers with ADD in my experience.

There is no "ADD epidemic", ADD has always been there, but many people weren't being diagnosed since few people were looking for it. What you don't look for you won't find. You've seen more cases of depression in the last 10-15 years. Is that because there are more depressed people? Or is that because doctors are started to be more aware of it and seek treatment and more GP's are finally learning how to diagnose and treat it instead of pretending it doesn't exist or it's not a real condition? This is the same thing that's happening (slowly) to ADD, unfortunately many ADDers are often not diagnosed, especially adults. Undiagnosed and untreated ADDers often self medicate with alcohol tobacco, drugs, gambling etc and have higher rates of depression, anxiety and divorce. Many don't seek treatment because the negative stigma around ADD promoted by some members of society.

Industrial factory type jobs aren't very great workplaces for us ADDers, but some jobs are. High tech types jobs can be great for us see http://adultaddstrengths.com/2006/02/09/top-10-advantages-of-add-in-a-high-tech-career/

Continuous partial attention era? Perfect for ADDers. This comes naturally to us. Might be a problem for non ADDers though.