Are you sitting in meetings, your BlackBerry partially hidden, texting, emailing, and Web browsing? Are you enjoying lunch with a colleague while managing your calendar? Are you on a conference call, but finessing a spreadsheet and muting the speaker to confer with colleagues?
C’mon, admit it.
You and thousands of other “digital natives” have a new moniker thanks to Lee Rainie, the 2007 MIMA Summit Keynote speaker and Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project.
You’re an “absent presence.” And quite possibly proud of it.
Raine’s oxymoron describes your essential multitasking self. Like the oxymorons “deafening silence” or “darkness visible,” Rainie’s term is a marriage of contradictions: you’re physically present, but mentally absent. Or, more charitably, mentally distracted.
This is not always a bad thing. As Jason Fried, another MIMA Summit speaker and founder of 37signals, quipped, “the email you don’t even know you’re getting is more interesting than the meeting you’re in.”
Mind you, Fried takes a hard line on meetings, calling them “toxic, costly time wasters that convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute.” He’d probably give you permission to be an “absent presence.”
So now that your species has been identified, let’s examine your traits. One, Rainie says, is that you “pay continuous partial attention.” You want to vigilant about, well, everything Web 2.0, but the volume of information is simply too great.
Another is that you engage in both “horizontal and vertical reading.” Horizontal reading is not what you do in bed. It’s what you do when you skim through 20 emails by scanning the subject lines and the preview text, scroll through your Google Reader for blog posts that catch your attention, or scan the abstracts on Forrester for relevant articles.
In horizontal reading, you’re skipping like a stone across a vast lake of information.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just horizontal reading.” Try that next time you’re taken to task for multitasking during a meeting.
“Vertical reading” is the proverbial deep dive, when you — gasp — actually read an entire article or book or series of posts related to your topic of interest.
“Today, attention is both truncated and elongated,” explained Rainie.
Because I’m sensing that your attention to this post will soon be truncated, I’ll wrap up with a few suggestions. (And please add your own.)
When you find yourself behaving as an “absent presence”… politely ask that the meeting be shortened. Or grant the meeting organizer the courtesy of your attention. Eye contact and focused attention are powerful — to give and to get.
When it’s your (important!) meeting and people are becoming “absent presences”… speed up your delivery, distill your content, jump to deadlines and deliverables, ask for better behavior, or just end the meeting.
The digital natives will thank you.
