When gurus attack - Stowe Boyd gets defensive aboutLinda

Linda Stone has an odd way of responding to the comments I made recently about Continuous Partial Attention in my Reboot talk, Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Flow. I guess she must have a google search bot running for Continuous Partial Attention, and it led her to Stephanie Booth’s post about my talk. Fine. But she left a comment there addressed to me, as if it was my blog, not Stephanie’s. But I don’t think Linda looked at my slides. She certainly wasn’t there for the presentation. I am not Stephanie Booth, so her paragraph is her own take on what I said. Here’s Linda’s comment:

Stowe,

I read your paragraph above regarding my continuous partial attention thesis. Once again, you appear to misunderstand my work. Check http://www.continuouspartialattention.com.

Continuous partial attention is not something that I judge to be “good” or “bad.” EVERY attention strategy has a place and matches to an activity, a desire. CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention, that is — operating in a constant state of vigilance, high alert, always on, is stressful to the body. It creates an adrenalized fight or flight state, cortisol floods the body. The bottom line: continuous partial attention some of the time can be a great thing. Continuous, continuous partial attention — or continuous partial attention ALL the time, is a contributing factor to insomnia, obesity, and stress-related diseases.

Cheers,

Linda

Ok, again Linda asserts that I don’t understand what she is saying. First of all, you superficially state that you don’t think CPA is good or bad, but then she tries splitting a hair by asserting that its only CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention that’s bad, leading to obesity, insomnia, and dandruff. CONTINUOUS continuous? Isn’t continuous once enough?

She seems to be saying CPA isn’t bad so long as you don’t do it CONTINUOUSLY. Isn’t that the whole point?

Sure — I accept the notion that at some times it may be attractive to close the door, turn off the music, and only listen to the tiny voices in your head. But I believe that the value of that sort of disconnected time is over-rated: it’s not a given of human psychology, it’s a cultural, learned behavior.

I don’t think that CPA leads to your adrenal glands being in an uproar, unless you have grown up in an environment where CPA is foreign, like baby boomers. Modern homo sapiens is content with constantly scanning, constantly grooming tribe members, constantly remaining connnected, constantly juggling. I don’t have insomnia.

Here’s the slide I used in my talk, which I pulled from something she wrote back in 2002:

In the talk, I lumped her and her anti-CPA screed (Yes, Linda, that’s how I interpret it, and please stop telling me I don’t understand you. I understand you better than you do.) along with Toffler’s Information Overload (it’s driving us crazy, he asserted) and the Attention Economy mavens (free information leads to attention scarcity). I don’t buy any of it.

Here’ the Contrarian View to CPA:

One of the points I made at Reboot is that we will be in a war with the folks that want to tell us that flow is bad for us:

(Yes, that is Instant Messaging Barbie. If anyone out there has one, I would love to buy it!)

Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don’t do things that way.