cited in Meanwhile: A tale of snail mail – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune
“Linda Stone, a former Microsoft techie, characterizes ours as an era of “continuous partial attention.” At the extreme end are teenagers instant-messaging while they talk on the cellphone, download music and do homework. But adults too live with all systems go, interrupted and distracted, scanning everything, multi-technological-tasking everywhere.
We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to ever more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.”
These concepts of “continuous partial attention” and of expanding personal bandwidth are good ones to explore in the learning domain – but it might also be instructive to look back at parallels in earlier times – surely the multi-tasking capabilities of a traditional housewife (simultaeously cooking, washing, child-minding, talking to the neighbours etc) is at least at the same level of attentional complexity, as is the cognitive load of driving a carload of passengers, or of playing / coaching many team sports. I wonder whether the initially compelling idea of a problem with increased attentional load from new communications technology is an artefact of the shift in attentional focus required by adults using such technology. Adults are so used to applying continuous partial attention in other domains that they only become aware of attentional load when they have to retrain their attentional habits to different cues.
The notion of “expand(ing) personal bandwidth” is also one that is initially compelling but in the end as Stone asserts, probably illusory. I suspect that personal bandwidth is a limited capacity and that while communications technology may expand the pool of connections available to us in both temporal and spatial domains, it does not expand the communications bandwidth for sustaining meaningful communication. Our communications horizons may be expanded, but our attentional capacity is still limited in focus.