Adaptation in the age of ADD

The most startling thing about this sessions' reading — chapter 1 from Davenport and Beck's "The Attention Economy" — was to realize that it had been published in 2001. In "digital" years, that might as well have been the dark ages: before ubiquitous cell phones and text messaging; before Facebook and the like; before other Web 2.0 applications that are highly attention-intensive—in short, before our digital lives really became crazy. It's remarkable to realize how taxing all of these daily, almost constant distractions must be on our brains ... but is all of this making us stupid (as Jacie brought up)?

Clearly, we've all become a little more ADD in the way we approach information: We skim, browse, surf, and otherwise gloss over wide expanses of data ... but, then, we have to out of sheer necessity. Perhaps this is rewiring our way of thinking, but it (meaning the digital realm, especially the Web) is also expanding our ability to create, collaborate, connect, explore, co-critique, and expand our understanding. As Jacie pointed out, by allowing us to "forget" certain things that we can always Google later on when we need that piece of information, this should free up more brain space for greater niche knowledge and deeper wells of creative thought. In this sense, as we increasingly learn to manage our everyday information overload, we (theoretically speaking) should be able to adapt such that we can parcel out our attention more effectively—in other words, we're learning how to give less attention to the useless spam (mostly because better filters have improved that dramatically since 2001) and, hypothetically then, we should have more time/attention for the work that matters. Again, we're talking in theory here, since I recognize that we're still so inundated with information that actually carving out quiet space for creative work is getting harder and harder to do.

So, bottom line: The "attention economy" hypothesis put forward here certainly has merit in today's environment, but it doesn't account for the likely improvement, over time, of individuals in the way they manage that scarce attention.

Ah, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get through this article in full ... I just couldn't give it my full attention. ;)