Linda Stone and my Continuous Partial Attention

I would love to hear Linda Stone's keynote at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference that's about to start.

Where has our two-decade journey of building infinite, "always on" technological connections to each other taken us? How well do we manage technology -- or does it manage us?

Continuous Partial Attention describes the behavior of continuously monitoring as many inputs as possible, paying partial attention to each. We keep what we consider to be the highest priority contact or activity in greatest focus and constantly scan the periphery to see if something more important should be displacing our current top choice. Being busy, being connected, being a live node on the network, makes us feel alive. Or does it?! This talk explores a broader context for how we pay attention to each other now, how we have used our attention over the last few decades, and gives food for thought concerning implications that result as we consider new technologies and new interfaces.

Linda is "The Catalyst" in the Digirati. This is her profile:

Linda Stone is director of the Virtual Worlds Group in the Microsoft Advanced Technology and Research Division. She is a visionary both within Microsoft and to the industry at large. She is also extremely effective in making things happen. Her vision of the Internet is a place that embraces humanity and serendipity and supports rich social interaction, as well as recreation, information, and productivity. She's been promoting this view for years; it is only very recently that the rest of Microsoft has come to the Internet party and thus realized that Linda's work addresses some of the big societal(and business) issues we all face in the immediate future.

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