[iDC] partial vs. peripheral attention

[john sobol]

I've been giving continuous partial attention to this thread for the 
past few days. It has casually nagged at me as it nattered 
discontinuously along (listservs are 90% CPA) until just now, when, as 
I lay restlessly in bed giving continuous partial attention to all 
sorts of dreamy thoughts, I found myself focusing productively on the 
notion of CPA for the first time.  Which, in a way, is my point. That 
most of the time most of us are giving attention to many different 
things, and managing that aggregate feed quite comfortably, and 
choosing to focus on one stream or another only as needed. In fact, I'd 
propose that the P in CPA might more accurately be changed to 
Peripheral, as in Continuous Peripheral Attention. That seems to me how 
we live most of the time, even when we're unplugged. (All at once 
sensing faces, air currents, light sources, soundscapes, memories, 
hopes, destinations, calculations, companions, desires, aches and 
pains, etc.) And I don't see that our wide-spectrum awareness need 
necessarily interfere with our narrowband focus either. As an 
improvising musician I'm always trying to balance my focused and 
diffused awarenesses when I play within an ensemble. It's a technique. 
A sophisticated dialogical skill. Maybe such a skill has to be mastered 
to maximize the soulful usefulness of connected culture, like the 
competing Yin and Yang energies in Tai Chi, or the Jungian anima and 
animus energies. Maybe our (I say our because I believe this holds true 
for the vast majority of the readership of this list) resistance to CPA 
stems from our collective allegiance to literacy, a profound 
attention-focusing technology that unlike aural/oral or digital 
networked communication requires that peripheral attention streams be 
extinguished to be effective. When there's lots of noise we find it 
hard to read or write meaningful texts, and that makes us nervous. We 
'blank'. (Supposedly, tho I don't really believe in techno-blanking, at 
least not as something significantly different from all the other forms 
of 'spacing out' we know and love/hate) But our conflicted experiences 
as literate emigrants to the datasphere don't really matter here 
anyway. What matters is that there is a generation of kids out there 
for whom reading long texts is weird, for whom writing long texts is 
weird, for whom literate-style one-way communication that eliminates 
peripheral streams is downright freaky. That's why I'd like to think 
that continuous peripheral attention is a more accurate description 
than continuous partial attention, because the former allows for the 
possibility of a focused stream within that peripheral awareness, of a 
constructive managing of flow that transcends superficiality and/or 
chaos. And thus it suggests to me – in my more optimistic moments 
anyway – that the kids having sixteen conversations at once might be 
leading somewhere I'd be like to go.

John Sobol
www.thetalkingshop.ca

-- happy new year y'all -- 
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