Tuesday here at Etech began with Ray Ozzie, once of Groove and now of Microsoft, demoing the prototype for an absurdly simple yet marvelously useful little innovation: the ability to cut and paste events, using the Windows clipboard, such that they move from application to application (and Web app to Web app) with their structure and metadata intact. It’s a little thing, in one sense — but just the sort of little thing that stands in the way of the Web-based information realm being fully useful. That Microsoft is helping lead this change rather than fighting it to the last byte is remarkable. That Ozzie did his demo using Firefox was simply gracious. (He writes in detail about the project on his blog.)
Jeff Han showed his research into “multi-touch interaction” — giant touch-screens that respond to complex commands delivered via more than one point of touch. The interface hardly seemed as intuitive as Han promised (two fingers zooms in — or is it out?), and some of the demo resembled the manipulation of a virtual lava lamp. But when Han turned his interface into a giant light-table and showed how perfectly it was suited for the organization of large numbers of photos — and videos! — the value of the innovation became immediately apparent.
The ostensible theme of the conference this year is “The Attention Economy,” but most speakers barely addressed it. One notable exception was Linda Stone, the former Microsoft and Apple exec who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” back in 1998 and unpacked the term for us a bit here. (There are good notes from Nat Torkington on a similar talk she gave at Supernova last year.) She distinguished multitasking — where you’re switching between discrete goal-oriented processes — from the more diffuse and corrosive continuous partial attention, in which we are constantly “scanning for opportunities, optimizing for the best opportunity,” paying half a mind to what’s in front of us and keeping our peripheral vision peeled in hope of spotting something better. Stone says we’re driven by CPA out of a “desire to be a live node on the network,” to stay connected and to feel validated that we fit into a social web.
Stone placed CPA in a social-history timeline that falls into 20-year spans: a period from 1965 to 1985 in which we placed highest value on self-expression, creativity and personal productivity; then a period from 1985 to 2005 in which the network became paramount and we valued communication the most. I found this explanation so generalized as to be almost useless — “We played Battleship in the ’70s, we played Diplomacy in the ’90s,” she declared, but wait a minute, I played Diplomacy in the ’70s, and so did all my friends!
Nonetheless, Stone is onto something important here. Her description of our “overwhelmed, overstimulated and underfulfilled” technological existence wasn’t exactly what the technology-besotted ETech crowd wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it. Still, as I looked around at a sea of heads buried in laptops, sucking down the wi-fi, fingers darting to catch the latest email or Technorati result, I wondered how many had given Stone the attention she deserved.
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