Continuous Partial Attention is an invention of Linda Stone’s, US writer and ex-Microsoft research guru. It is the idea that our desire to pack as much into our time-squeezed lives as possible increasingly leads to a need to be always-on, always connected, always making the most of every moment. There’s a clear difference, she says, between this and multi-tasking. The latter is not continuous; it is motivated by a wish to be more productive and efficient and generally involves tasks that require low levels of cognitive processing. The former is a constant state of partial attention driven by a desire to be busy, connected, maximising on all opportunities, optimising every moment.
I’m not so sure that this applies to the majority of people but there’s no doubt that there are some people out there who seem to live their lives in a constant blur of connectivity – text, chat, web, mobile, the increasingly ubiquitous Blackberry. If behavioural adoption curves apply to this phenomenon then this will surely become more widespread. Perhaps…but perhaps not. At least not as widespread as you might assume. I think there is a significant minority of people who will never want to live like this, and will reject the very notion that they should be contactable at every and any moment.
Either way, the effects of this (and more generally the growth in media multi-tasking) on media planning are quite profound. More on this later…
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