i went to the heather gold show last night with sean and sean’s friend gordon from the internet archive. the show last night was on continuous partial attention, which is a term that seems to intuitively makes sense to anyone who has experienced it. heather had a variety of guests on to talk about CPA (although oddly, that abbreviation wasn’t used at any point in the evening), either about how this was a bad thing that should be stopped because it’s destroying our brains, or how it was an okay-to-good thing that was just part of our natural evolution as human beings. this is somewhat glib, but i’m going to go ahead and lump the invited guests into one group or the other here:

• CPA as bad thing: micki krimmel, doug pray
• CPA as good thing: derek powazek, lane becker
• CPA as other thing: justin hall, liz belile

i put myself in the ‘CPA as good thing’ camp, and I had the opportunity to go up on stage and sit with everyone and discuss my own experience with CPA for a few minutes. alot of the conversation focused on how our technology and our online lives takes time away from opportunities for self-reflection or just being with yourself. personally, i do most of my reflection in the shower, since the threat of electrocution generally provides me with a great opportunity to put down the laptop and just spend a few minutes with myself. the shower is where i think over whatever great puzzle is challenging me at the time, be it at school or work or in my personal life, and try to integrate the puzzle into the background of my daily thought pattern. and then, for the rest of the day, i subject myself to the noise of existence– random conversations, blog posts, chats, whatever, in a fierce attempt to find whatever idea or image changes my perspective from the problem into a solution. sometimes problems spend a few hours in the background, sometimes they become these persistent themes that last for weeks and weeks and get woven in with other problems.

my point in all of this is that doing CPA is a great thing for me– it’s not just that i have this need to constantly be aware of what is going on in the world (although i do), it’s that being exposed to all of these different ideas has become critical to my thinking process. it seems like every year my intellectual and professional life becomes more about insight and intuition and less about logical deduction and sequential processing, since so many of those tasks have been outsourced to the computers all around us. it’s like my ability to tie disparate ideas together has become how i differentiate myself from my tools.

(aside: i wrote this post over the course of several IM conversations, two phone calls, a face-to-my-face-looking-at-the-computer conversation, and three panel sessions, including about 75% of bruce sterling’s closing rant, which has been delightfully angry.)

books related to this post: of human bondage, the rise of the creative class

Labels: math, sxsw

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