This morning, someone talked about “Continuous Partial Attention.” As he talked, this appeared in my mind with capital letters. I thought, I’ll bet I could google that.
Forgive my ignorance if, as is probable, you are already familiar with the phenomenon, but I was right. It came up in capital letters, and googling the term brought up a list. I found it addressed by Linda Stone, who has been writing and thinking about Continuous Partial Attention for about fifteen years.
The person who mentioned it this morning was talking about the past week that has seen our attention divided with social media and then the sad onslaughts of news of tragedies in various places with the mass murders of innocent people. He mentioned our lives as being caught in the continuous state of having our attention mostly divided, and it was a good thing to have it focused for however brief an amount of time. Linda Stone, a speaker and researcher in many important forums about how social media and especially cell phones are dividing our attention, offers both cautionary terms and hopeful advice about this. Her most recent work on her website is from 2014 and mentions the misuse of Blackberries, which I don’t see in use so much anymore.
I’ve wondered for a while about multi-tasking, a similar but also different term, and I’ve decided that partial attention is possible, at least for me. If I am on my cell phone while others in the room are talking, I usually need them to repeat what they’ve said if I consider that I need to know. I’ve noticed that with my son as well. I will say something to him, and when he doesn’t respond, I will see that he’s texting. When I say it again, he says,”What? What did you say?”
It also seems that many people around me prefer not to pay attention. I see lots of escaping the dull moment in line into personal social media use. When I stand in line, I find people pulling out their cell phones just to ignore me. It is especially amusing when they call up friends to talk to them instead of being aware of the people around them or the environment they are in.
The person this morning who brought up Continuous Partial Attention was a pastor, and he was concerned that we pay enough attention in an sustained way so that we can think about helping people around us who might need it. Paying attention is one way of caring.
Linda Stone suggests that when we are with friends and at meals we check our phones and then set them aside to give our friends and family full attention. And we tell our friends this, saying that we will pay attention to them and not our Blackberries. Stone distinguishes between Continuous Partial Attention and multi-tasking, the latter of which she sees as a productive way of accomplishing low level cognitive activities that are sort of automatic. CPA, in contrast, seems to refer to our divided state of mind most of the time, where we are only partially aware of others around us.
One activity that I can advocate for developing full attention is writing. This may also be one reason why people have less and less desire to engage in it. Writing is the one non-traumatic activity we can do that will help us to become clear and focused in our thinking, keyed in to the present moment.
It almost doesn’t matter if we are even just writing something down in a journal. As Michael Carter has noted, even writing a narrative about something personal can cause us to achieve a greater focus on what has happened to us than not writing about it.
In fact, writing notes in a class before taking a test on the material is better than taking a picture of the notes on the board. In writing, we are often internalizing the ideas. Before I had to take twelve hours of exams in the process of getting my doctorate, I spent six months reading and taking notes on everything that I knew I would be tested on. This allowed me to focus on the ideas even under the stress of taking these long, timed tests.
Writing is what writers do, of course, and it helps us to pay attention. But it seems the sort of thing that many others might try to do more of, especially as it brings little trauma with it.