Is it possible that the nature of user's attention has changed, and continues to change in reaction to a change in communication brought about by social networks? I'm trying to dive into more in-depth, research backed positions about some of the key issues that have been bothering me. I'm using my background to find empirical information, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence. Most of the articles I read in other blogs on this subject rely on anecdotal evidence: increases in spam, increased search eliminating the need to know (when you can look up)

Here are the fundamental forces at work (tell me if these 'hit you'):

• You're finding yourself scattered, and have to really work to accomplish larger goals;
• The more "successful" you are, the harder it seems to be to "move the needle", because you're so busy attending to day-to-day tasks;
• You find it difficult to focus for long periods (magazines over books, lots of unfinished books)
• It's easier for you to express than understand - you find your ability to process information is high

There are some fundamental principles at work:

• What you pay attention to determines where you put your effort, because attention is the mind's way putting effort into something;
• That consciousness leads us to further exploration of those ideas, and a tendency to focus on those ideas over others;
• This tends to move our thinking, our actions, and ultimately our lives, in the ultimate direction of what you pay attention to;

Based on this process, which is ultimately the creative process by which the brain brings about what it can effect, it's incredibly important to manage your attention. Essentially, my argument here is that the brain ultimately governs our activities, and attention (conscious focus) is our mechanism for controlling the brain's direction.

I believe that much of these types of behaviors come from a lack of management skill, and awareness, of attention management. There are two concepts driving employees towards a reduction in attention:

• Reaction driven VS goal driven behavior is increasingly conflicting resulting in:
• Work Fragmentation, where tasks are switched repeatedly in short periods;

It has been my experience that the most productive employees that I have in my organization employee the ability to "turn it off". I actively encourage my staff to break their days into 4 hour blocks, and plan their days around that, as more granular planning tends to cause fragmentation rather than productivity.

Consider that there are two basic types of work activities: those that are reacting to a circumstance (the boss wants the report, the program has bugs, etc), and those that are driving towards a result (we aim to accomplish x by y date for z result, on plan). These work types are fundamentally separate, and while arguments can be put fourth that would say, "I'm working on fire drill X, to support Y date," it's really a rather poor argument because in a goal driven project you would account for interrupts, but you cannot, fundamentally, account for goal-orientation in a reactive, interrupt-driven environment.

I would argue that Business Processes are essentially enforced goal/principle driven development. The way you can tell these two things apart in your day-to-day work is simple - if your activities are focused on delivering a solid, defined end-result, then it's goal oriented. If it's reacting to circumstances without a top-level structure that drives towards end result, it's likely interrupt driven.

For a theory of how this works, consider the work of Donald E. Broadbent, a famous English experimental psychologist. In 1958, he published research where he set fourth a theory called the selective filter theory.

He is the author of a theory called selective attention, and did a lot of work on short term memory (so called "modal memory", or the theory that memories somehow graduate from short-term to long-term after a period of time). Selective attention is the real key to understanding what's going on with attention in the modern era.

Goal driver VS interrupt driven action. Trying to stay tuned to the current situation, while also trying to keep in mind long term goals. Biological foundation: keep an eye out for predators while we gather food.

In “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age” (Prometheus), author Maggie Jackson states that, "the average knowledge worker switches task every 3 minutes," and, "1/2 of the time interrupts themselves before they are interrupted."

That's a lot of interruptions.

The NYT article referenced above also quotes:

Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day, the business research firm Basex estimates. The risks are clear. As one top executive told me, “Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites.”

If attention is expensive, is not the primary potential of social software the streamlining by centralization of the world of filtering information? Put differently, is social software's ultimate aim to concentrate the burden of information processing to mechanisms that make it more efficient (or at least to concentrate the value of having those connections VS other means)? And, if it is, is it working, or are social systems contributing less to collective intelligence and more towards attention interruption and an overall increase in the burden of selective filtering and corresponding decrease productivity. Ideally, social software should answer, or at least be able to significantly contribute to the answer to the question, "What is the most important thing or things I should be paying attention to right now?"

According to Comscore, time spent on pages is moving ahead of the pages viewed (source: Time Spent On Social Networks):

This would suggest that we're actually gaining more value, or perceiving such, with fewer pageviews, and that social networks are getting better at delivering information in a more condensed fashion.

In the same report, time spent per person across the top properties varies wildly, and social networks are not the only top contenders:

Note that many of the top sites are not social networks, but look at the length of time users spend on sites like YouTube and MySpace:

Further, social networks have engagement levels that are simply mind blowing compared to many traditional sites:

So, it looks like social networks are capturing our attention. But remember that the majority of time spent is reaction driven attention. I would therefore argue that if the primary potential of social software the streamlining by centralization of the world of filtering information, it's not working. We're pumping vast amounts of time into gathering and filtering information, much more time than we were before. Further, we're fundamentally changing how we spend our time in our day-to-day lives by addressing tons of bite-size information bits (as witnessed by the high page views on social networking sites), and if filter theory is correct, we're actually degrading our ability to process information by attending to lots of small pieces of information at the expense of the remainder.

Does that not suggest that while the connectedness has increased, the value of the information has decreased radically? From this conclusion, one has to ask whether Social Networks are driving towards more meaningful communication at all, or whether our "feeling" of connectedness is in fact flying in the face of our ability to deeply process information, and successfully execute focused activities.

There are a lot of other aspects here, but I wanted to post about it. I originally tweeted this whole thought on Twitter:

I'm curious what you're thoughts are. Post a comment or ping me on twitter.