Attention
Let's say you're dividing your time between weeks in the jungle exploring Mayan ruins and addictively surfing the net from your Manhattan apartment — but what you'd really like to be doing is writing the Great American Novel. Or let's say you're interested in becoming a well-read person while trying to turn out newpaper columns and commuting and keeping up with your family (and addictively responding to email from your office). Or maybe you just want to get some long law review article written that will change the world, but you keep wondering whether someone has been trying to get in touch with you online.
Maybe even now you're waiting for peace and focus to descend on you, and you're wishing that you had a long plane flight ahead - anything, anything at all to keep you from being distracted.
It's clear that speakers can't take the attention of their audiences for granted. But it's also apparent that knowledge-workers (or whoever it is that might be reading these words right now) can't take their own attention for granted. This focus can be split in a hundred pieces across a dozen tasks every day. We can be deeply embedded in a hundred different online communities. That's all fine.
But what's happening to our ability to do longterm work? Do we now have to go to greater lengths than earlier generations did to get anything done? Is there a cost to this fractured attention, or are we just getting better at processing information — so that we really can listen to a podcast, write an email, open a chat session, and write the Great American Novel all at once?
Gotta go. Someone's IMing me.