No One 'Goes' Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)

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Opinion

No One 'Goes' Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)

7/5/2006

By Terry Calhoun

It’s truly amazing how archaic air flight is for information age professionals. We still don’t have batteries strong enough to last through a flight. Although I carry a special power supply kit, I have yet to fly on an airplane which has a public supply to tap into. Partly because of that, and partly because they haven’t decided yet how much we’ll pay to be online during flight, today’s long flights are interruption-free vacuums. For the particular one I am on right now – Detroit to San Francisco, change planes for Honolulu – I brought a bunch of work to read and five novels.

The front pages to the second novel, Tom Dorsey’s The Big Bamboo, which I just started, contain a simple quote from Ronald Reagan on an otherwise blank white page: “No one g'es Hollywood – they were that way before they came here. Hollywood just exposed it.” That’s the perfect riposte to July 5’s New York Times column by Thomas L. Friedman, “The Age of Interruption.”

The first novel I read on this flight was Mike Resnick’s Starship Mutiny. (I do find it hard to read “deep” stuff while flying.) Every time I paused in my reading of Starship Mutiny, my mind went back to Friedman’s column, which I read in the airport while we waited to board.

Friedman is the keynote speaker at The Campus of the Future: A Meeting of the Minds conference, which I am flying to attend. I’m likely not to be in a position to actually spend some face time with Friedman, but if I were, I would really like to speak with him about “The Age of Interruption.”

The column in question begins by sharing his perceptions of the complexity and violence of the Peruvian rain forest, noting that in the rain forest, species that behave like Palestinians and Israelis find themselves extinct. No argument there. It’s something like an evolutionary principle that we apparently hate and fight those we are most like. Sometimes even way beyond what is evolutionarily reasonable.

Then Friedman notes that he was without the Internet for four days. He found it “cleansing” to spend “four days totally disconnected” and called it the “best antidote” to the disease of our age, “continuous partial attention.” We agree on the “cleansing” aspect, but go our separate paths on the assumption (his) that this is in fact a “disease of our age.”

My first thought was: geez, those insects, monkeys, and birds struggling in that rain forest certainly live lives with “continuous partial attention” (hereinafter CPA). (The phrase itself reminds me of another NYT article in today’s paper – about nasty second-party bill collectors and how their continuous partial attention to alleged debtors can ruin people’s lives.) When you are under constant threat of predation, it’s remarkable how easy it is for something to get your at least partial attention.