Alec Saunders SquawkBox

James Enck has just posted annualized rates of landline attrition for several ILECs.  The numbers are shocking.  Attrition has doubled in the first half of this year, with some US states seeing annualized rates as high as 16%.  I’ve previously written about this in the context of Bell Canada and CRTC policy, but it looks as if we have finally reached the tipping point.  We may be witnessing the global collapse of the incumbent telecom monopolies. 

I’ve been tracking the noise in the blogosphere on Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention concept ever since her presentation at SuprNova in June.  In Linda’s view

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we’re connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

We’ve been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time. Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind.

We’ve become ultraconnected.  We carry blackberries and cell phones, have multiple landlines, multiple emails addresses, multiple IM personas and so on and so forth.  How connected?  Well, Kathleen Pierz of the Pierz Group publishes a table of the range of ways we can be reached, which I’ve stolen, and added a few more to.  How many of these apply to you?  Four, six, eight?  Usually when I ask that question, most people nod their heads all the way to 12, 14, 16.  It’s quite amazing!

Here’s the paradox.  Although we live in this ultra-connected world, it’s harder to reach us — most people give up after two or three attempts.  Three out of every four phone calls end in voice mail.  The calls we do receive?  Many are simply inappropriate, or unwanted.

Some people thrive in this environment.  Rick Segal talks about his days at Microsoft where he would handle as many as 800 emails in a day.  Scoble apparently manages 500 a day today.  How does one get any work done in that environment?  When does Continuous Partial Attention simply become Attention Deficit Disorder?

People are developing coping mechanisms.

• Change the polling frequency of email so that it polls just once an hour instead of every 15 minutes.
• Turn the "toast" feature of IM off. No more pop-ups to let you know that your friend has just appeared online.
• Set your phone on Do Not Disturb to get some work done.
• My own personal favorite: I filter everyone who sends mail to me that ISN’T already in my contact list into a "follow-up later" folder. 

Stowe Boyd, on Corante, advocates a social filter.  Spread the load across your friends, and network with your buddies.  You run the risk of creating a self-referencing system, though.  Never mind alienating your friends.

The key to solving this problem is not Continuous Partial Attention.  What we really need is to have continuously relevant interactions with those around us.  We need to be able to instantly assess the importance of a particular communication, and deal with the most important interactions first using whatever value system appropriate to define importance.  Ed Batista gets to the idea very nicely in his piece What’s Important Isn’t Necessarily Urgent. We all get lots of communications requests in a day — lots of demands for our attention — but very few must be attended to immediately.

My contention is that technology created this problem, and technology will play a key role in solving it.  Relevance filtering technology — software that can discriminate and make choices on your behalf — will become common over time.  You’ll train it as your assistant, and then rely on it utterly and completely.  But that’s a topic for a future post.