You're invited to this complimentary seminar, covering business topics from leaders in today's leading companies—delivered via web conferencing from Microsoft Office Live Meeting. All you need is a web browser and a phone. We hope you'll join us.

Instant Messaging in the Attention Economy
October 26, 2004
9:00AM - 10:00AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
12:00PM - 1:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Speaker: Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante

Seminar Overview

The discussion around instant messaging generally centers on the first order effects of its deployment: costs, risks, and direct savings. This was true of all preceding communication media as they were being adopted by business, as well: telephone, fax, email, and cell phones. But as we now know, the second order effects – that generally take much longer to become manifest – are significantly more important in the long run.

We now live in the world that email built; but are headed for a world where instant messaging will become the foundation technology of communication. What will that world be like, how will it be different, and why should we work to adopt the new modes of interaction and communication that this medium requires?

We are in a time of unparalleled information access, but this paradoxically limits our ability to absorb information, because we have limited bandwidth: only so much attention to go around. Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate, once wrote, ‘What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’

Linda Stone coined the expression “Continuous Partial Attention”, characterizing it as an aberration, a disorder, and an unnecessary disruption in business. But the benefits that arise from reorganizing around real-time coordination, collaboration, and communication pathways – most importantly the acceleration of response and increased parallelism – outweighs the apparent change in social mores needed to accommodate this new form of interaction.

This seminar will cover:

• What are the first order benefits from IM, and why are they less important than generally argued?
• What is “Continuous Partial Attention” and why does its adoption offer advantages, not disruption?
• Why does IM etiquette matter, and what can we learn from the biggest users of IM?
• How can we gain the acceleration latent in massive real-time communication across projects, the enterprise, and the extended enterprise; and what role can instant messaging play?

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