We had an interesting bit of "training" over the lunch hour today. One of the deep-thinkers wired himself into our large conference room via two-way webcam, and--unloaded a couple decades of experience on us, which included the pendulum-swings between centralized and distributed computing fads, and also the dead-wrong predictions/assumptions committed by even the most forward-thinking the technorati.
For me, the money-quote was the prediction of an "information economy." Our guest re-cast that instead as an "attention economy," on the premise that information is only valuable if someone reads/views/hears (and, I would add, acts upon) it. Our colleague also theorized about our obsession with glowing rectangles (phones, tablets), and the apparent necessity of maxing out our attention bandwidth when it's not satisfied with the work and people and general doings around us.
Those two notions (attention economy and voluntary information saturation) kind of meshed into the notion that, in terms of classical economics, we're voluntarily debasing our own currency. (Most especially when those brain-CPUs are in paparazzi or "Farmville" spaces.) I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal if Moore's Law and the general premises of computing applied to the think-meat between our ears. Presumably then we could evolve to a state where our internal process monitors looked something like:
30% - Curing Disease
30% - Ending Poverty & Injustice
30% - Saving the Planet
0.0001% - How long are those eggs in the 'fridge okay after their expiration date?
9.9999% - OOOOH--SPARKLY BALL OF TIN FOIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me, I'm not holding my breath. But in the absence of unprecendented rates of brain evolution (or neural augmentation), our techniques for managing divided attentions will have to evolve to take up the slack. And, sadly, I'm not holding out any more hope for that, either. Not after seeing how stubbornly mainstream corporate culture invests in tired carrot-and-stick paradigms, years of disconnect between worker productivity and pay notwithstanding. Sigh.
But such cognitive fragmentation is something we need to start acknowledging in our work lives--and devising coping strategies for its corrosiveness. Particularly in my profession, where one is expected to toggle between blinders-on, deep-dive focus and collaborative brain-pooling in such an immediate and binary fashion. Anything less is living in denial. And, in the long run, the cost of living in that zip code is higher than anywhere else on earth.
