Breathe In, Breathe Out

Attention Must Be Paid

Continuous partial attention and multitasking are subject that have popped up here previously.

Continuous partial attention occurs when someone doesn't pay attention to any one thing continuously, but pays partial attention to lots of different stuff. Most of us have talked with someone who's checking email or texting while engaged in our conversation. Drives me nuts, but that's another story. For more, see Linda Stone on continuous partial attention.

But what if you wanted to educate these multitaskers on the metaskill of paying attention? And I don't mean just forcing them to put down the Blackberry, but really develop a new attentional skill. I think that would be particularly hard with people who have grown up with Internet, WiFi, texting, video games or whathaveyou.

Howard Rheingold, a writer-turned-teacher, took on the challenge with college kids who had signed up for his course on social media. He seems to take it very seriously, having the class delve into the subject of attention before even addressing the class's subject. What I like most about his approach is telling the kids to notice where their attention goes as things unfold in the class.

Were you tempted to check email or read RSS feeds as the video played?

Learning Makes a Difference

Image from jonhanson, via Flickr (CC license)

As long as our nervous systems continue learning, we'll probably be OK.

My post on Learning and Change added a Feldenkrais Method spin on a video rant by author Susan Jacoby. Jacoby goes on about the dumbing down of American culture. For example, in one study only 23% of people with some college could locate Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Israel on a map - and the map was labeled.

So it's a bit refreshing to find some smart and informed examples of people who go against the trend. By now, this is not exactly new, but check out the You Tube video that shows what happens when a reporter tries to put a young Obama supporter on the spot by asking for specifics. Find the video here. And for even more specific stuff on interviewee Derrick Ashong, watch this video.

Then there's the news media and their assumptions about news consumers. Kevin Kelly points out their possible role in the dumbing down scenario and finds a nice counterpoint:

In other words, that's the conventional wisdom about newsy stuff: There's the boring important things on the front page and the frivolous self-help stuff on the rest. What Hirschorn found in his study was different:

Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting...

So maybe we're not all as dull as some make us out. As long as our nervous systems take advantage of the learning experiences richly available everywhere, we'll probably be OK.

Learning and Change

Sometimes I think the Feldenkrais Method gets oversimplified in an attempt to explain it to more people. It's easy to get to the point of lumping it into a sort of rehab service or method of improving your posture. Certainly, it does offer those things, but I hold that it's really about developing the ability to pay fine enough attention to a situation so that you can develop alternative ways of going beyond that situation.

Too narrow a definition and it risks losing the focus on learning that goes way beyond posture, quasi rehab or what-have-you.

How can these ideas of learning, particularly the one of developing awareness of current situation before developing alternatives, be applied outside of the somatic realm? Journalist and author Susan Jacoby offers a dandy way when Bill Moyers interviewed her for PBS recently. See the video here.

Jacoby rants on about the dumbing down of American culture here and in her book, The Age of American Unreason.

I mean, for example, obviously the healthcare situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But if people don't know, for example, how is healthcare handled in other countries? How many people, for instance, do have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. In other words, you can say, "Oh, we don't want a program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors." Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network.

I found it refreshing to see these sorts of ideas alive in the conceptual/intellectual terms, with absolutely no mention of anything somatic.

And this idea of establishing a base of knowledge of how things are is getting especially important in this US presidential election season. The term Change seems to be on every candidate's lips. But change from what; change to what?

Jacoby's argument clearly has a liberal flavor, so I was surprised when she took both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration to task for failing to provide such educational services. They made major policy moves without first educating us on what they mean and why they are important.

As a contrast, Jacoby offers FDR's radio addresses of the 1930's and 40's. Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the pubic to spread out a world map before each chat so that they could follow along, actually see what and where Roosevelt was talking about, and make some sense out of it. Today, one survey shows that only 23% of people with some college can point out important Middle East locations, even when the map is clearly labeled.

Sad comment on our educational system, at least as far as geopolitics goes.

I think the Jacoby interview serves as a good example of taking a universal principle like learning about current situations, and then broadening it to include world politics. The absence of knowing where we are, of having the knowledge and information to locate our starting position hinders our ability to navigate in the world, whether somatically or conceptually.

It's all a learning process.

On Dedicated Functionality

I've been writing a few notes here in Circus Ponies Notebook about a New York Times article on the shortcomings of Twitter with the younger crowd.

That article identified a technology theme that keeps coming up for me. Namely, why use a complex but flexible tool when a simpler but less flexible tool already provides the functionality you need?

In the article, a mother of three teenagers tries to simplify communicating with all three kids simultaneously. At first, she's getting a slew of text messages from each of the kids, and it's driving her nuts. Then she decides to try Twitter, thinking that it simplify things by centering the messages to and from her in one place.

Photo by kafka4prez, via Flickr (CC license)

the kids are having none of this Twitter stuff

Only the kids are having none of this Twitter stuff. They're quite happy with texting and email, thank you very much. And they don't want to learn Twitter, which they "don't get" and think is too complex. If something already works, does what you want it to do, why get more technical and complex? Why go to the bother, when there's really nothing to gain - at least from the kid's viewpoint?

That's a good question, and one that I keep coming back to in looking for software for researching, writing and posting. For example, I like the simplicity of Notebook for outlining and writing over more complex apps. You can just start jotting things down and worry about rearranging them, shaping a structure, later. Other outlining apps offer more power and flexibility, but they aren't as simple to use.

So I'm not up for reinventing the wheel when it comes to outlining and writing. But if something simpler and easier to use comes along, I'll give it a try.

And, to be honest, I don't really get Twitter, either.

PC Experiences

Photo by rtpeat via Flickr (CC license)

$800 ... That's half of what he paid for the machine in the first place!

It was four years ago now that my frustration with Windows and PCs got the best of me. One too many crashes, lost information and mounds of time to restart, reconfigure and re-experience the nightmare that had become Windows. I switched to a Mac. My blood pressure came down and life just seems better overall these days. Have I ever looked back and regretted my decision. Well, not really, not even for just a minute. There's plenty of reinforcement to help provide backsliding here. Times writer Harry Hurt III provides one in [his account](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/business/smallbusiness/09pursuits.html?ex=1360299600&en=f630c3ca1da8f959&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss "Sending an S O S for a PC Exorcist - New York Times") of the $800 he had to spend to get his new PC's functioning restored. That's half of what he paid for the machine in the first place! So, no, I haven't regretted the switch. And even though I *could* install Windows on my Intel-based Mac ....

Information Wants to Be Embodied

We attended a performance by author David Sedaris at a local theater a few months ago. I had heard Sedaris a few times on public radio's This American Life, but didn't know much about him. For an admission cost of $95, I wondered what kind of performance he'd give us.

I guess I was expecting a kind of stand up routine or lecture. Instead, Sedaris mostly just read from a manuscript he was working on. And he was visibly editing the script based on audience reaction.

I loved every minute of it.

Had you told me beforehand I was paying good money to observe a guy editing copy, I probably would have dismissed the whole idea. After all, I could listen to Sedaris for free on the radio or borrow one of his books from the library.

What would make me happy to pay for something I could get for free?

Kevin Kelly couches the question in slightly different terms, but does a great job explaining in Better Than Free. He starts by making the point that the Internet creates copies of everything digital. This makes stuff that can be digitized more or less free.

But there's a paradox here: superabundant copies become free. However, when this happens, it's the stuff that can't be copied that becomes scarce and valuable.

Kelly calls the stuff that can't be copied "generative qualities." He lists and elaborates on a number of them in the essay. For the David Sedaris performance, the thing I was paying for was embodiment:

At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today -- which may draw ticket holders to a big theater -- may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won't have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

It's a bit ironic that I found Kelly's essay in my news aggregator, available for free as are the hundreds of feeds I read regularly. Would I pay for this essay? Sure, if it were in a more permanent and convenient form like, say, a book. That would add a generative quality of accessibility, and make it worth a few bucks to me.

But it would also add the generative quality of findability, perhaps exposing the essay to readers who might not find it on the Internet. According to Kelly, findability is one of the value functions by aggregators. Not the software programs that process RSS feeds, but the organizations that package talent and information. Part of the bargain here is the aggregators (producers, distributors and labels or PDL), offer avenues to direct attention to the information being produced.

I think Kelly himself kind embodies this quality with his websites and books. He's also part of the lineage of that grand aggregator of information from the 1960's, The Whole Earth Catalog.

And if Kelly wants to come read from his manuscript , I'll happily buy a ticket.

Heuristics by Any Other Name

Did you know that it's best not to pull the choke in a motor boat if the motor was running within the past 20 minutes? I didn't, and in fact would have no reason to even seek out such knowledge. But if I ever find myself adrift in a powerless motor boat, it might come in handy.

The choking advice above is one of the many "rules of thumb," kind of informed guessing strategies, contained on the Rules of Thumb site. The site is based on the out of print books of the same name. I ran across it on the Cool Tools site; one site that certainly lives up to its name.

You'll find the lots of categories of rules, which you can select from a menu or a word cloud. Just for grins I selected the writing category and found these:

• Read your work out loud to locate problems. If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. (Or hopefully, you don't have a lung problem.)

• When in doubt, use the semicolon; the average reader won't understand its use and will give you credit for erudition. (See the last sentence of the second paragraph above.)

• When writing, if you're searching for a final sentence, you've probably already written it.

Did I mention the motor boat thing?