Continuous Partial Attention not Certified Public Accountant

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Where am I?

I am sitting in a chair in front of my computer which is on (to be honest) the nicest table I have ever owned or pretty much seen.

I am also looking out the window at the trees moving in the breeze, the California April afternoon of my dreams which is also where I was a few minutes ago. And where, to be honest, I more or less "am" now.

I am thinking of the table of friends across the green, Kevin Claire Lia Cat Nicole, and of the conversation we were having fifteen minutes ago when I was with them. And thinking of what they are talking about now, and how nice it might be to still be there drinking an espresso and listening as people use their mouths to make sounds that others understand. So, I'm sort of there now, too.

Next to me is a book. Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It is about a world not unlike and yet not like Earth. It parallels Earth's history in many ways, yet just differently enough to be fascinating. It sits next to me, all 935 pages of it. I was reading it on my porch, in the California April afternoon of my dreams, when I was called over to sit at the table of friends across the green. It exerts a pull on me, or several pulls: the pull of a book I am in the middle of and want to be reading, on the porch; the pull of a narrative that wends its way into my thoughts no matter how much I am focusing on writing this blog; the pull of a book that I've read before, and know I should recall, and yet do not, so that this curious thing (why did I remember the part about the clock, and the discussion of what comes down to Platonism vs Aristotelianism, and yet not remember the fable of the fly, the bat, and the worm?) calls to me and makes me focus on it and not on the task at hand.

So where I am is partially, continuously, in Stephenson's fictional world, which is like and unlike our world.

And I haven't even talked about my cell phone, which is sitting quietly next to me, because I've selected All Sounds Off, but which nonetheless exerts a kind of constant pull to its potential delights, terrors, information, conversation. How many times do I look over at it? Pick it up and look for texts? See if anyone has called? I'm pretty focused right now, and so the current answer is not too much; I've managed to go a half hour at least without even thinking about picking it up. Ok, I just picked it up to check. But that's only because I started to write about it. Scout's honor.

So. Where am I, now? Where are you?

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Continuous partial attention or CPA is something I've found my way to, like Hansel and Gretel, and the bread crumbs I've scattered on my way to CPA are not all still there, if you follow my fairy tale analogy. But I've been thinking about how cell phones distract us, and also allow us to be in constant potential communication with a whole range of people and places (Facebook, ESPN, Kirkwood Mountain and its weather). If there is something called focus, then there can be kinds of focus; if there is something called attention, then there can be loss of attention, or lack, or deficit. One of my latest tag lines has been "Everyone in the United States has ADD" because most of us are surrounded by devices and habits that make attending to one specific task almost impossible.

The quick and dirt way to understand Linda Stone's concept of CPA, or anything really, is to paste shit in from Wikipedia, right? I said right? Ok. So here goes:

The term Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: "It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish." Continuous partial attention has been understood as multi-tasking, but it is somewhat different, as full attention is not used (hence the partial) and the process is ongoing rather than episodic (hence the continuous).

Stone herself wants to draw a distinction between CPA and multitasking. She says in an article from Lifehacker.com:

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient... In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There's a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities—activities or people—in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

http://lifehacker.com/#!343882/multitasking-versus-continuous-partial-attention

We might well ask the question, is this a distinction without a difference? I've been looking at some of the recent research on multitasking, and most of it seems to say, there isn't much that is good about multitasking. In a few instances it makes sense to scan information constantly and intermittently because we know that some of it won't be that useful or even relevant later, while some of it will turn out to be valuable in some way. And we can't know this beforehand. But of course most of us can feel the downside to this behavior, whether we call it CPA or multitasking or mundane cyborg activity.

In another short piece in The Huffington Post, Stone addresses this:

More and more, many of us feel the "shadow side" of cpa -- over-stimulation and lack of fulfillment. The latest, greatest powerful technologies are now contributing to our feeling increasingly powerless. Researchers are beginning to tell us that we may actually be doing tasks more slowly and poorly.

And that's not all. We have more attention-related and stress-related diseases than ever before. Continuous continuous partial attention and the fight or flight response associated with it, sets off a cascade of stess hormones, starting with norepinephrin and its companion, cortisol. As a hormone, cortisol is a universal donor. It can attach to any receptor site. As a result, dopamine and seratonin -the hormones that help us feel calm and happy - have nowhere to go because cortisol has taken up the available spaces. The abundance of cortisol in our systems has contributed to our turning to pharmaceuticals to calm us down and help us sleep.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/fine-dining-with-mobile-d_b_80819.html

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So what do these two pieces of blog have in common? I'll keep it short. As I hope I've shown, already we are multiply-located, as humans. We are here, and we are also there, in memory, in desire, in readiness for fight or flight or a new input for the sensorium. Now we have added devices that have a multiplier effect on this multiplicity. Few would dispute that the cell phone, which is actually a number of things besides a cell phone, and the net-connected computer (and its nomadic sister the laptop/tablet and its midget cousin the smart phone), do not add mightily to this several places at once phenomenon.

And the final irony may be that the cell phone/computer prosthetic may also change the way we are when we are not even in their presence, or "packing" as people used to say of guns.

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Here I"m tempted to tell you how to 'fix' this "problem.' Nope. Partly i think you can imagine fixes already. And partly that is the wrong way to pose the question of how these cyborg prosthetics extend and augment human responses that are already "there" in the organism. More, I want to suggest that the language we are using to imagine these effects - addiction to cell phones, information overload, multitasking vs CPA, ADD vs focusing techniques - are part of a larger and less visible change in basic human behavior and our experience of time and space. And this is what I want to call the mundane cyborg.

Enough for now. Time to walk the dog out in that lovely Californian afternoon.