I'd heard about Twitter but not checked it out until last week, when I wrote about it as a kind of mini-blogging tool. Since then, it's kinda been like deciding to notice red cars or green shirts: they seem to be everywhere. So it is with Twitter, getting buzz from thousands of directions at once. Most of them positive.
But not all. Is Twitter Too Good comes from one of the folks responsible for those brain friendly books on html and programming of different sorts. The objections boil down to three: Twitter's innate addictiveness, its potential for producing a false sense of connectedness, and its mighty contribution to the phenomenon of continuous partial attention.
Now, as someone concerned with body awareness, the idea of partial attention got ... well, some of my attention. Turns out its an idea largely fleshed out and talked about by Linda Stone. There's much more about continuous partial attention in one of Stone's keynotes and in a Newsweek article.
Stone's treatment focuses mainly on the workplace, and probably mainly in the technology sector, as we might expect from her background. And if you spend much time at all around corporate folk, you've probably witnessed firsthand the partial attention that comes with Blackberries, cell phones, pages, notebook computers or any other sort of communication contrivance. It's not even unusual for people in bathrooms (otherwise occupied) to take calls or tend to email while they are pursuing other things. But I digress.
One of the things Stone mentions gets my attention more than this stuff:
For those of you who think that you are witnessing a 50 year old's meltdown, consider this, a 20-something said to me recently, "Linda, I quit every social network I was on so I could actually have dinner with people." When I speak about continuous partial attention to groups of young people, they resonate, they beg for strategies‚ they want a better quality of life. This 24/7 thing isn't feeling so good and more and more people want to feel better.
A bit refreshing, that. Maybe all of us won't be doomed to continuous partial attention - at least some are questioning it as a lifestyle. After all, as Stone puts it:
Attention IS our scarcest and most valuable resource. What we do with our attention defines us.
Come for a Feldenkrais lesson sometime, Linda. On me. But you'll have to turn off your Blackberry first.