I enjoyed putting together and doing the "Instant Messaging and the Attention Economy" presentation last week (see this summary of what I thought I was going to say before I actually sat down to do the preso). Here's a link to the recorded presentation.

I owe the "Attention Economy" concept to Herbert Simon, who wrote "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

I have argued in other pieces that Continuous Partial Attention is not a disorder, but a meaningful strategy to deal with the world we are living in. But in working through my thoughts for the presentation, I had a small epiphany.

CPA looks inefficient when you view productivity at an individual level. I am working on project X, and you come along (via IM, let's say, although it doesn't really matter how) and ask me a question regarding your project Z. I have to pay the participation costs of switching context -- recalling what Z is all about, etc. -- and then after our conversation, I have to pay the additional costs associated with recalling where I was on project X. Its estimated that this timeslicing can lead to as much as a 40% decrease in personal producitivity.

However, when you view productivity at the network level, things are not so simple. If I had spurned your request for my help on project Z, that project may have stalled for hours or days, until I was finished with the task on Z. And if all my network of contacts all operate on the same "one thing at a time" model, a large number of projects might stall, waiting for participants to complete some task. As a result, the local optimization of my personal productivity can lead to a networkwide decrease in producitivity. Like an assembly line worker who focuses on making carburators, but could care less about the rate of overall automobile production.

When viewed from the network perspective, time is a shared space. For the benefit of the productivity of my buddies -- the first level of the network that radiates out from me into the larger world -- my time is truly not my own. I am linked to the world through collaborative relationships, where I am obliged to make time for others on a regular basis, even if in fact it negatively impacts my personal productivity. This is counterbalanced by the likelihood that in the future those interrupting me today will tolerate my interrupts.

So, continuous partial attention -- manifested by instant messaging my partners during meetings, for example -- is a different take on productivity, a different, and more socialized concept of networked productivity. From the older, linear viewpoint, someone who has shifted over to CPA will seem borderline ADD, but we're not. Its just a different strategy for allocating attention based on time as a shared space