Continuous partial attention? Switch off!

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Ken Yarmosh has a thought-provoking post titled Unplug.me.

“Always on connectivity seems to create a strange predilection to always know (”know” is relative to the thought above because the quality of what we “know” is questionable). For example, a mobile phone compels us to always be available or at least sets the expectation that we always should be. Friends and family become frustrated when they cannot immediately reach us, even in non-emergency situations, they call us several times in-a-row or quickly remind us that we did not call them back in a day’s time.”

Ken’s post reminded me of a post I read a long time ago on “continuous partial attention“, a phrase coined by Linda Stone, a former researcher at Microsoft.

On another note, Ken points out Andrew Keen’s new book and says that “…we become wrapped up in worlds we create; we often create mindless, unintellectual worlds closed to viewpoints other than our own.” Carte blanche statements like that make for good soundbites, but hold little value in a more rigorous analysis on social networking and citizen journalism.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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One thought on “Continuous partial attention? Switch off!”

  1. Pingback: The problem with mobile phones that grab our attention « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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