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Hey There, Pay Attention For A Minute

The theme of this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference is "The Attention Economy," about tools and techniques for filtering all the demands we have on our time and attention. The scene as I walked through the hotel Tuesday morning, approaching the registration desk, was a perfect illustration of the problem. It couldn't have been better if the O'Reilly people had planned it. I passed by a few clusters of people talking and far greater numbers of people sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over their laptop computers and connecting to the Internet. These people cleared off their schedules to go to this conference. Many of them took long, uncomfortable, and expensive plane flights. And then they spend time sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over computer keyboards, physically alone but, presumably, connecting to others online. They'd chosen to focus their attention elsewhere.

Would Linda Stone, one of the speakers at the conference, find that behavior harmful?

Stone, a veteran of senior positions at both Microsoft and Apple, coined the phrase "continuous partial attention" in 1998 to describe the state most of us have lived in for as long as we can remember. We've got some primary task in the foreground to which we're devoting most of our attention, but we're also monitoring things in the background and prepared to switch to another primary task at a moment's notice. We might be talking to someone else face-to-face while answering our cell phones and monitoring our pagers and BlackBerrys. Or we might be writing a blog entry about the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, while also monitoring E-mail, instant messaging, keeping our cell phone within arm's reach, and still wearing the headset we were wearing for a conference call that ended a few minutes ago. We're ready to drop what we're doing and go do something else at a moment's notice--and then go do it again.

The era of continuous partial attention has left us overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled, said Stone, who's now working as a consultant and writer.

This era, she says, is coming to a close. "CEOs ask people to disarm at the door when they come to a meeting," she said, asking attendees to drop off their laptops, cell phones, pagers, and BlackBerrys before the meeting started.

Stone's talk was valuable in that it pointed out a problem that many people struggle with every day. I know I do, and I'm not always successful, either. But she wasn't really able to suggest solutions, except to say we should do a better job of prioritization. She said "alpha geeks," such as those attending the O'Reilly conference, will develop tools to help people better filter out the competing demands on attention.

During the era of continuous partial attention--which she identified as 1985-2005--the most important criterion for user-facing software was ease-of-use. That will continue to be important, she said, but it'll be more important whether software helps improve quality of life and productivity.

By the way, I don't mean to be a big fat hypocrite here: If you'd caught me later in the day Tuesday, I'd be one of those people sitting with my back to the wall, hunched over a laptop. I was writing and filing my story on the conference, focusing on an interesting presentation from Microsoft chief technology officer Ray Ozzie about tools to connect Web sites and desktop applications using the humble desktop clipboard.

In other interesting news out of the conference:

- Yahoo is expanding its API program to boost use of its Yahoo Photos, Yahoo Shopping, and other features by allowing developers to write third-party applications built on the services.

- An NYU researcher displayed a new kind of tabletop computer interface with a touch-sensitive surface that can be manipulated by the user's hands.

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