Jon Udell is surprised that the blogosphere didn't megalink to Clive Thompson's Sunday New York Times piece, Meet the Life Hackers, an attempt to dig into the issues and answers to living in an interupt-driven world. I riffed on it (see Meet The Life Hackers), but I think that Clive Thompson merely turned over a bunch of rocks -- mostly Microsoft projects -- and added a few shallow insights from the conventional wisdom jar. So I disagree with Udell's surprise at the blogosphere not bubbling about it all:

[from Jon Udell: Attention economics]

You'd think that Clive Thompson's article Meet the Life Hackers, in this week's New York Times Magazine, would have produced a storm of commentary. After all, it's a major mainstream outing of Linda Stone's evocative phrase "continuous partial attention," Danny O'Brien's seminal talk on the seven habits of highly effective geeks, and Merlin Mann's 43 Folders. Yet the blogosphere has reacted less vigorously than it would have a year ago.

The CPA meme has been around a long time, and despite the recent reappearance of Linda Stone at Supernova, neither Udell nor Thompson comment on the fact that she advanced the concept of continuous partial attention as a disorder, something to be struggled against, not as a workable response to the world. Likewise, 43 Folders and O'Brien's thoughts are not new revelations, and Thompson's piece seems to poke at the issues but not come to any real conclusions.

And Udell sort of trivializes the fact that younger people are more likely to split attention across various media or activities at the same time:

It's often suggested that this [interruptibility] isn't a problem for generation X, Y, or Z, the new breeds of post-humans who've adapted to continuous partial attention. I don't completely buy that argument, and neither does Clive Thompson.

And why don't they buy it? All the recent evidence about concurrent media exposure (see Concurrent Media Exposure: Another Form Of Continuous Partial Attention) demonstrates a strong age polarity in this regard: the younger you are, the more likely you are to split your attention over mutliple forms of media at once. Udell's handwave argument is so anecdotal as to be immaterial: some researchers who had some students reply in an informal discussion that they wanted to be "saved" from interrupts and split attention.

This is another battle in the war against continuous partial attention, which is a culture war. Various forces -- mainstream media, large organizations, and others threatened by a dimuition of their power -- would like us to focus just on one channel at a time, especially when that is their channel. The recent example of the WSJ's D3 conference requiring attendees to not multitask on their laptops while attending is a great case in point:

[from The War On Continuous Partial Attention]

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.

I am all for being "productive", but I want to be able to define what it means. And any piecework model -- where my productivity is solely measured by the number of pins I crank out every day -- will be a poor picture of productivity. I am open to being distracted by my social universe, and I am willing to accept that interrupt to help them make progress, at the expense of personal productivity. I IM during meetings, because I want to remain in touch with the larger world.

The backchannel may be of the foremost interest to me, and what may appear to be the foreground activity may actually be on the back burner, for me.

These are all indications that the war for attention is a power struggle, and those that couch it in terms of personal productivity and manners are actually trying to slow or counter a revolution in the making. We are rejecting the centralized control of our personal agenda. I am willing to pay the costs of remaining socially engaged -- through continuous partial attention, remaining interruptible, and exchanging social capital with others along the way. Make no mistake about it, it's a struggle for attention freedom.