“Flow” is a great concept. It neatly encapsulates a lot of how I increasingly interact online and with a range of workmates and acquaintances. It’s an model of interaction (think entertaining a three year-old whilst catching up with the housework and firing off the occasional twitter or working with an office full of busy people who periodically need your attention but not in a scheduled way) that works very well as a metaphor for integrating online and off-life post-Facebook. But this post (The War On Flow) doesn’t really read like anything by the Boyd I’ve been reading so far. And not in a good way.
Firstly, I want to state that I really enjoy Stowe Boyd’s blog. I get a lot of brain-food from it and it’s something I check most days of the week (though – see previous post – not last week). However, his response to Linda, who argues that being completely switched on to some form of connectivity (Continuous Partial Attention) at all times could lead to a problems (I’m radically over-simplifying – here’s her site), is less than constructive.
Here’s what she has to say on her site:
“Like so many things, in small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.”
Stowe doesn’t address that. He takes a five year old quote from an old paper of hers, tells us that she understands her better than she understands herself and that she has somehow declared “war” on “Flow”. His view is very much all or nothing – the new race who”get” flow and do nothing else or the (presumably) unevolved humans who don’t.
Now I can’t actually see an awful lot of difference between “Flow” and “CPA” in some ways but I think that there’s a level of sophistication to Linda’s views on the subject that Stowe doesn’t give her credit for.
“We have focused on managing our time. Our opportunity is to focus on how we manage our attention. We are evolving beyond an always-on lifestyle. As we make choices to turn the technology OFF, to give full attention to others in interactions, to block out interruption-free time, and to use the full range of communication tools more appropriately, we will re-orient our trek toward a path of more engaged attention, more fulfulling relationships, and opportunities for the type of reflection that fuels innovation.”
Stowe Boyd claims in his post that
“Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don’t do things that way.”
I was bought up a strict Catholic and rebelled against dogmatism at an early age. Dogma limits your horizons and ties you into inflexible ways of behaviour and thought that undermine your creativity and stop you from making connections and linkages that might otherwise enrich your life. I don’t see that Linda’s view of CPA is incompatible with Flow, other than being something that Stowe Boyd doesn’t like and I don’t think the style of dogmatism he’s presenting here does him or his thinking any credit.
I’m also intrigued by his claim that Flow is a reversion to an earlier form of pre-agricultural consciousness, scanning the savannah for predators and looking out for jaguars etc. Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bloodrites makes a persuasive case for the advent of agriculture being one of the factors that led to the development of ceremonies of death and sacrifice as a substitute for the ghosts of those events on the savannah – of being hunted and being the hunter. Of course, those ceremonies rapidly became the preserve of men. So perhaps Stowe Boyd’s response is just that – a thoughtlessly atavistic reversion to pre-agricultural norms. Certainly he makes it all sound very macho.
Hopefully he’ll re-think this at some point – as I said, it doesn’t read like anything produced by the generously spirited writer I’d become accustomed to over the last few months. Linda comments on this at Paticls here (second comment) and there are notes on Stowe Boyd’s Reboot presentation at Climb to the Stars, plus the comment by Linda that triggered the whole diatribe.
Filed under: Flow, Linda Stone, Stowe Boyd, arguments, continuous partial attention
On Boyd’s post on The War on Flow (by the way, your link’s broken) he says:
“I don’t think that CPA leads to your adrenal glands being in an uproar, unless you have grown up in an environment where CPA is foreign, like baby boomers. Modern homo sapiens is content with constantly scanning, constantly grooming tribe members, constantly remaining connnected, constantly juggling. I don’t have insomnia.”
It sounds like he’s asserting that “modern” homo sapiens (Gen X and after?) is somehow physiologically different than baby boomers and previous. I can’t agree with that. Adrenal insufficiency caused by constant stress is a recognized root cause for many “modern” illnesses, including asthma, auto-immune diseases, and polymyalgia. If modern man were able to tolerate high levels of stress, why are these diseases so prevalent? It’s a foreign environment to all humans, in my opinion. Maybe people can “get used” to it, like city dwellers who tune out ambient noise, but the human body and consciousness (on some level) are still aware and responding to the stimuli. And sometimes the responses are long-term or delayed, like disease, rather than immediate or short-term, like insomnia.
And the part about pre-agricultural consciousness? Well, his example of flint-knapping while chatting and scanning for predators sounds a lot like keeping an eye on the toddlers while cooking dinner and answering the phone…not a foreign state of consciousness around here! Though from what I read on Linda Stone’s page, this sounds more like her definition of multi-tasking rather than CPA.
And of course the social element: if we’re in a state of CPA, when are we giving other human beings our full attention? When are we respecting others?
Sounds to me like Flow and CPA are different beasts, given my minimal, layperson’s understanding. Flow would not be stressful, CPA definitely would. In one of his slides he describes Flow thus: “Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).” Whereas my picture of CPA would be a state of not concentrating on any one thing at all, but rather being bombarded with a variety of inputs.
[...] Stowe Boyd retorted to this that CPA is just a normal evolution with which people who grow up in it have no trouble dealing and uses the term ‘flow’, even though his vision seems to have its shortcomings. [...]
[...] here’s an intelligent comment from a reader of Stowe’s [...]