I was following the thread of various folks' responses to a recent piece on Continuous Partial Attention (see here), and came across this piece, which suggests that various institutions -- in this case the Wall Street Journal's D3 conference organizers, including tech pundit Walter Mossberg -- are declaring war on CPA. Apparently, Jason Pontin (Technology Review's editor in chief) was asked to stop blogging by a staffer, although it turns out later that wasn't the real issue. The conference organizers sought to shield the conference from wireless so that attendees would not blog, email, IM, or backchannel -- wanting to keep everyone's attention completely in the forechannel, completely focussed on the presentations, etc. Mossberg's response:

[from comment at Pontin's blog post]

It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else. We merely declined to provide wi-fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences -- near universal checking of email and surfing of the web during the program. The policy wasn't aimed at blogging, and any staffer who said that was just plain wrong. We are fine with blogging. We deliberately invited bloggers. And we provided a bank of PCs right outside the conference room hard-wired to the net.

Yikes. Another culture war, where the institution -- here the WSJ -- deems some new style of communication and social interaction the ruination of the prior Golden Age. But this is just another attack on continuous partial attention, which is, at its core, an allegiance to broadcast, mediated, unsocialized communications. In this case, the WSJ -- although you can replace it with any institution, such as a corporation laying down rules for behavior in meetings, for example -- wants full attention on the official speakers, and no side channel discussions. But in a many-to-many world, where individuals want to participate in unmediated discussions, and who believe that their social connectedness is more important and strategic than the task at hand, as a general rule, The WSJ's iron-fisted approach to stamping out back channel IMing will anger the most connected and ruin the conference for us.

Personally, I suggest a boycott of stupid, singlethread, chowderhead conferences that prohibit wireless on this basis. I am all for asking people to turn off cell phones -- the ringing and talking is annoying. But demanding that we fold our hands and pay full attention to the talking heads on the podium is nonsense.

You want to hold our attention? Get better speakers! Throw out the panel sessions and the powerpoints! Use video, and music! Practice what you are going to say, instead of hemming and hawing up there! Speak more quickly, say less and make it worth more!

Others have chimed in:

Wade Roush

[from Continuous Computing Blog: Disconnected at D3]

From this perspective, preventing Wi-Fi connectivity at a conference means depriving attendees, at least for a few hours, of their situational awareness and their connections to their productive groups. This may be justifiable, especially if audiences go into an event knowing that they'll have to disconnect. But the benefits to the speakers and organizers should be weighed against the fact that audiences will be less productive and will be cut off from the intelligence of their groups (which may even include fellow audience members, in the case of an IRC backchannel, for example).

I'm not going to argue that we deserve to drag our electronic umbilical cords everywhere. Concert halls should probably be off-limits. (And perhaps bedrooms: A startling number of people admit that if their cell phone rings during sex, they answer it.) But I believe that those who want to reach large audiences--whether at a conference or through a broadcast or a publication--will eventually have to recognize that the audience's partial attention is the best they can hope for, and the most they have a right to ask for.

More than ever, we are connected beings. Now we have to figure out, as a society, when it's proper to ask someone to disconnect--and in effect, to cut off a part of themselves.

I got the pointer to Wade here, Crumb Trail, who adds a misleading analogy between CPA and multithreaded programming of computers:

Throughput on compute intensive tasks is degraded and total throughput is degraded except in cases where there were many wait states. Time slicing and task switching allows that otherwise idle time to be used. Not all of it can be used since it takes time to switch tasks, but when the length of the wait state exceeds twice the task switch time there is an increase in throughput.

When such machines were configured wrong they ended up spending too much time in task switching - they thrashed, squandering their power on the overhead costs of task management and getting little real work done. This is more than just wasteful since it has ripple effects. It wastes the time of everyone who depends on the computer, like sitting and waiting for a web page to be served by a thrashing server or flooded network.

This is the real cost of CPA. Not only is the thrashing individual's performance lowered, so is that of everyone who engages with them. Charm school classes and time management seminars will teach methods to avoid CPA and increase fun and profit.

The problem here is -- again -- measuring the efficiency of the individual "machine", ahem, individual, as opposed to the network of connected machines as a whole. If all the nodes in a network ignore interrupts from others until they reach a wait state, individual productivity of the node may go up, breifly. That is until the node requests information from another, and is blocked: the other node is not at a wait state, and won't respond. As a result, the productitivity of the network decreases. And, on the social level -- leaving mechanistic productivity concerns aside -- opportunities to touch base, exchange social context, or build trust and obligation -- these are all lost when we put task work deadlines ahead of social purpose. If we are going to have charm schools helping people out in this regard, let's not have them forcefeed Taylorist dogma while calling it time management.

The war on Continuous Partial Attention is on: they will maintain that it is good for us, we need to be less distracted, more focused, more productive, and ultimately, happier. But those who have shifted to a social work ethic resist. Our time is truly not our own, and in a good way. We are supported by a network of partners who will pause, give advice, offer suggestions, and then return to work. Who will take a productivity hit so that we can make headway. And who fully expect us to give back, the same way.

We know the benefits of participating in a backchannel IRC during a conference panel session with various marketing weenies one-upping each other at our expense, or of replying to an IM from a client during a meeting so that hours can be saved on a critical project turnaround. And, yes, we know that old school types -- bred in the days when people worked on a single task at a time, on a single project at a time, and were responsible only for moving stuff from their inbox to their outbox (and I don't mean email) -- they are going to have a difficult time moving to a time-shifted world. But it's here, and the rest of us are living in it.

[Note: I find it strange that both Crumb Trail and Wade quote my earlier piece on CPA, but don't link to the piece. Odd.]