Islands of Total Attention

28 April 2007 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Internet, Media | Comments

I’m just back from an exciting and exhausting week at ad:tech San Francisco, and I’ve been mulling over the different kinds of value that people can extract from going to conferences like ad:tech and the iMedia Summits.

The worst thing I can do at a conference is check email on my Treo. Yes, there are times when it simply HAS to happen, but I try to unplug (I’ve written before about how hard unplugging can be) as much as possible.

Why? so much of my life — and the lives of anybody who deals with multiple media in a single day, hour or minute — is diffuse, subject to what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.” At a conference, I can focus entirely on a conversation that I’m having in person, looking into the eyes of one other person or a small group. It’s ephemeral but valuable… an island of total attention. This is the best reason to go.

This goes beyond networking, which is the tactical advantage one can get from spending time with other people while standing on that island of total attention. If I have any business success to speak of, I think it’s because of this sort of interaction, when I can find out whether the person I’m chatting with has children or hobbies or health problems. We all exceed our contexts, but with so much communication happening digitally it’s easy to let the excess vanish from consideration.

Doing so is a problem because it’s the excess — the hobbies, the memory that a business associate’s son hasn’t started talking at 2 and that this bothers him — that makes my business colleagues into PEOPLE rather than functions, and that can then turn them into a much more precious commodity: friends.

Attention is also a hot topic in media circles because — like engagement — it is so difficult to measure. Compete Inc. and Nielsen//NetRatings are both trying to figure out attention metrics, while over at both iMedia Connection and his blog my friend Joseph Carrabis has been questioning the extent to which attention and time-spent-onsite can be equated. Web Metrics blogger Stéphane Hamel also writes intelligently and usefully about what he calls “the Attention Economy.”

But while I agree that measuring digital attention is difficult, surely we can agree that measuring interpersonal attention face to face is easy. We all know when we’re talking with somebody who is looking for a better conversation, or to chat with somebody more important. We all know when we’re being rude by glancing over the shoulder of the person with whom we’re chatting. And we all both know and feel the value of having somebody’s total focus, particularly when it’s somebody we like or respect. Many times, I’ve heard people praised in this way: “when she’s talking with you, you have her total attention– she’s not looking at her watch.”

I can give people that Zen-like focus, but only sometimes, and I feel guilty when I don’t… but so often I hear the chronically growling voices of my other responsibilities in the background. Yet, for ethical, business and personal reasons it’s important that I do this, that I focus. Relatedly, this is one of the reasons I’ve cut down my engagment with Instant Messenger so dramatically.

I’m beginning to have my doubts about the possibility of measuring digital attention, and perhaps that’s a good thing because if we CAN measure digital attention then we might stop valuing the interpersonal, face to face attention that I think is so key to healthy, interesting and productive relationships.

While you can quantify some of the OUTCOMES of going to an iMedia Summit (e.g., “I made X many contacts, X many sales leads, and I had X many meetings with current customers”), the real value is so much less tangible and quantifiable. This is also true of ad:tech, of having a face to face breakfast rather than a phone meeting, et cetera. Such value may be beyond the ability of science to measure (although I realize that, with Joseph Carrabis as a friend, writing this is equivalent to throwing a glove down in front of him).

This also relates to the value of GOING to college versus taking extension courses or distance learning, a topic that I discuss with my wife, Kathi Inman Berens, who teaches at USC. Kathi thinks a great deal about what’s important and valuable about the residential college experience, and having seen her with her students I don’t think there’s a way to quantify the kind of attention or the immense value of the attention that she gives them. (Perhaps I’ll be fortunate, and Kathi will comment on this post.)

Working in digital media, so much of the time if you can’t quantify something it doesn’t matter… the “if you can’t count something then it doesn’t count” bias that shows that the internet was initially built by engineers. Lack of quantification is one of the many things that bedevils the liberal arts to demonstrate its value proposition, but there’s a deep value to exploring beyond the limits of the quantifiable.

The social scientist and literary critic Michel de Certeau expressed it this way:

Ever since scientific work (scientificité) has given itself its own proper and appropriate places through rational projects capable of determining their procedures, with formal objects and specified conditions under which they are falsifiable, ever since it was founded as a plurality of limited and distinct fields, in short ever since it stopped being theological, it has constituted the whole as its remainder; this remainder has become what we call culture.

Maybe one day science will be able to quantify and explain things like engagement and attention to everybody’s satisfaction. Until then, I’m going to keep on stealing time on the islands of total attention.