ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

ONE GREAT IDEA that I took away from Nexus 2007 is what Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) calls Continous Partial Attention. Not that the phenomenon is new, but because it describes succinctly what I’ve been (and still am) experiencing. Finally, I can name it.

This is a new design challenge in this age of information anxiety and abundance of meaning. More and more people, myself included, are doing many things at the same time. However, decades of research (and common sense) have indicated that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. For example:

• “We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” says René Marois, neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, quoted in a recent NYTimes piece about how multi-taskers max out their brains, creating neural network bottlenecks and causing confusion and mistakes (thanks, Susan Mernit).
• When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” (thanks, DeedsDoing 2006)
• “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run,” says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, quoted in a CNN report last year.

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IN Dutton & Aron’s Two Bridges experiment (1974), male participants were asked to walk across the Capilano Canyon suspension bridge in Vancouver. Others were asked to walk over a low bridge. Although the men were told that they were being asked about creativity and scenery, they were actually being tested on their emotions. The woman interviewing them subtly dropped them her phone number in the middle of the questions. The same woman did the interviews on both the low and high bridges. The end results: Among those who walked on the high bridge, 60% used the number and called the woman back. Among those who walked on low bridge, 30% picked up the phone.

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Extracts from an interesting article on “Relativism and the Net” by David Weinberger:

Y’all know the relativist argument: Other people have views they hold as strongly as you hold yours. Those views are incompatible with yours. Thus, a sense of certainty is insufficient to guarantee truth. Therefore, we can’t trust certainty. Therefore, we have no way to decide whose views are right.

Good things come from this relativism, including a willingness to listen to others and maybe even a little humility. (That was, at least, until the Bush Doctrine declared humility to be unpatriotic.) But relativism contradicts a tenet of knowledge: To believe something is to believe that it’s true. Relativism wants to keep sneaking in a qualifier — “Of course, I might be dead wrong” — that seems to destroy the possibility of knowledge.

Worse, relativism can sap action: Since all sincerely held beliefs are equally valid, why go to any pains to defend yours?

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ATTENDED a Teaching, Learning & MBTI workshop two days ago. A good revision. Still same profile. But the mode of learning was fun. The workshop leader L. divided us into different ‘camps’ at certain points in time. For example, ‘Extraverts’ versus ‘Intraverts’, and ‘Thinkers’ versus ‘Feelers’. We were asked to list the strengths and weaknesses of the people in the other camps. Had a ball laughing at the positive and negative attributes. Some said thinkers are cold and merciless. Others said feelers, though compassionate and caring, can be quite illogical and unjust. Read the rest of this entry »