Latitude

With the supply (attention) and demand (information to be processed) ratio becoming ever more unbalanced, the common conception is to view gratuitous information as an interloper in the real stuff of life. It’s a daily battle–and maybe, if you’re one of the lucky few, you can either 1) ignore the sirens of shiny new information altogether, or 2) deal with them effectively by super-usering your way through the noise with Inbox Zero, perfectly filtered tweets, and keyword-customized news aggregation in real-time–that is, if such an elaborate panacea for attentional importunities could be said to exist at all.

A recent, flavorfully written article in New York Magazine entitled “In Defense of Distraction” (wonderfully ironic in its longwindedness, by the way–8 digital pages, which I inhaled with atypical focus), concedes that the Internet truly is a veritable Skinner box with the most effective variety of classical conditioning in place (a “variable ratio schedule” of positive reinforcement–much like the model used for slot machines).

The poet William Blake once wrote that John Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” because of the magnificence with which Milton described Satan’s character in Paradise Lost. Sam Anderson, author of “In Defense of Distraction,” sympathizes with the inevitability of exultant, forgivable distraction in much the same fashion.

[The Internet] dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity—a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there—in gloriously unpredictable cycles. It seems unrealistic to expect people to spend all day clicking reward bars—searching the web, scanning the relevant blogs, checking e-mail to see if a co-worker has updated a project—and then just leave those distractions behind, as soon as they’re not strictly required, to engage in “healthy” things like books and ab crunches and undistracted deep conversations with neighbors.

Anderson, predictably, goes on to make the case that a generation of platform-hoppin’-multi-taskin’-iPhone-slingin’-”look-at-me-funny-and-I’ll-immortalize-you-in-a-tweet-right-here-from-the-grocery-store-check-out-line” digital natives is naturally conditioned to draw creative connections and form syntheses more adeptly in the way that geniuses of generations prior (Einstein and Lennon, for example) typified. He sees changes in media as the catalyst for such creative outbursts.

Anderson paints a beautiful “big picture.” But what does that mean for the “attention crisis” and personal information processing in the everyday?

The Side-Effects of Organic Processing

The notion of being entirely self-determining with regard to information is outmoded; information, in our web-pervaded world, is a moving, living thing– “everywhere in general and nowhere in particular,” and unique at any given point in time. I visit your lifestream; we all experience a flood of information.

I used to read blogs very carefully, going through my RSS as if I HAD to read all my feeds to stay on top of things, to know all I should now. Then I realized something intangible and inexplicable seems to exist on the internet: a phenomenon that makes any information that HAS to reach you, reach you… But my conclusion was that there is no need for a process on informing myself. I just read whatever reaches me, without trying to force anything. So I guess people are my source of information, whatever the medium they use to pass information to me.

Laurent Haug, Founder & CEO of the Lift Conference

When I load Twitter, log into Tumblr, or visit a FriendFeed page, I rarely go backwards in the stream; where we used to “surf” the web, we can “ride” the web now (“that phenomenon that makes any information that HAS to reach you, reach you”). This more “organic” processing of information might be, simultaneously, the unintended cause and the ongoing affirmation of a new associative ability in digital natives and subsequent generations.

According to Anderson’s article, “Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level.“

I can enjoy the sense that I am now residing in a stream of information, but first I have to surrender some control and go where it takes me (remembering that it’ll take me anywhere I need to go).