In 1997 I coined the phrase "continuous partial attention". For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships. We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits. We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.
With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.
We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time. Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind. Marketers humming that tune for two decades now.
Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.
From Clarke Ching's I Think Not, Baby Puppy
I’m still an amateur, but Flores’ stuff revolves around conversations, commitments and trust. To put in my simplistic words, it is much easier to manage if people make good commitments that keep. If they keep their commitments then trust develops. High trust organizations need less ceremony, paperwork and bureaucracy to keep things flowing. Conversely, in organizations where people don’t keep their commitments, there is generally low trust, the costs of enforcing commitments are high and they are very hard to manage. Contrast a software development team that keeps its commitments by delivering projects on time and budget with one that doesn’t. Where would you rather work? Which would you rather have as your supplier? Which has the most paper work? Which team’s customer tries to drive productivity by enforcing arbitrary deadlines?
This trust, commitment, conversation stuff kinda obvious I suppose, but it’s not so easy in practice because most of us aren’t taught how to do it. Some of us do this intuitively (not me, to be fair), but what Flores did was figure out a framework for having conversations that result in kept commitments and build trust.
From Tim Leberecht at the The MindJet Blog
Granted that technology manages to create a system that possesses the functionality and is easy to use at the same time, will it really cover all intelligence that is inherent in the corporate DNA? It is interesting in this context to look at the distinction between the “conscious” and “unconscious mind” that Albrecht translates from the human to the organizational psyche. While the conscious mind, that is, an ongoing “multilogue,” a mindful and explicit conversation among the organizations’ members, documented in words and data, may be easier to capture by existing business intelligence software, the unconscious mind, that is, the tacit knowledge, the unspoken “culture” and sub-text of an organization, is a moving target that is much more difficult to harness. All business intelligence and collaborative tools are clearly biased towards explicit information.An Interview with Rich Levin by Shel Israel at Naked Conversations
The trend is clear. The younger generation is leaving traditional media in droves. Print, as we know it, will be dead in 20 years or less, when the current generation, which doesn't remember a time before computers, becomes the establishment. Nobody will be reading paper-based newspapers or magazines. Nobody will need them. Only books will survive.
The Internet will also consume all other forms of mass communications: voice, video, TV, radio, print, music, billboards, film (while big-screen movies will survive, they too will be digital). And there's no turning back. Like 35mm film, Polaroid and smoke signals, print will be relegated to an art form, and will no longer be part of the mass media.
From Frank Caputa at pc4media
It is official. If you had any doubts before, I claim Technorati to be a media company. It is a NEW media company. But, it is a media company, nonetheless.
Why claim this now? No. Not because they put me on their little list. Because they get it. They realize that content production is now free from the constraints of cost. Content's distribution costs are zero. They have been for a little while now. More importantly and more recently.... With legions of "WE" generating content, content production is now zero cost. The only thing left is to aggregate it in interesting ways - that content producers respect - and then serve advertising.
Not much different than a cable channel or a satellite company or even a movie theatre chain. Is it?
Imagine a News Corporation, Disney or Viacom with no distribution and no production costs! After you change your pants, Mr. Murdoch, read on:
Have you seen Technorati's Live 8 aggregator? To all you techies, I know you'll get what they are doing as soon as you see it. It is photos, bookmarks and blog posts from around the web all aggregated into a nice looking web page. All this "content" discusses the topic of Live 8, a benefit concert tour. An event.
From Doug Manning at Proactive Living
Hope has fallen on tough times. The prevailing perspective today is that hopefulness is naïve. In our culture, we regard critics as more intelligent, the hopeful as less in touch with reality. In truth, it takes great wisdom to see and actualize the possibilities in a world that prefers to feature life’s problems on the front page.
Do you want to see what hope looks like? Go to the interactive graphic on Income Mobility in the U.S. and mouse over the 'Bottom Fifth' of the income spectrum. Do you see that group of 'bottom-fifthers' who had found their way into the top income earners ten years later? That's hope, plus a proactive pursuit of tangible opportunities, turned into the financial sustainability that each person desires.
That's all there is time for tonight... enjoy!
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