10 Membranes

Fractured Partial Attention

Tom Armitage’s excellent piece on the iPad and the Kindle has provoked a general positive response, and for good reason. His point is similar, although more developed, nuanced and paying closer attention to the materiality and objectivity of the devices, to that I made in a review of devices for the Frankfurt Bookfair. My point was that while the iPad is unquestionably the superior device owing to its more potent functionality for long form reading - book reading basically - the Kindle was the hands down winner. Partly this was, pre- cloud platform, down to range as well as pricing issues. However it was also down to the uni-functionality of the Kindle and indeed ereaders generally as they focus one on reading, in fact, they force concentration more than a book whose very materiality can prove a distraction. The Kindle makes you read, whereas text on the iPad is a veneer for a garden of delights beyond. Reading on the iPad is to be constantly aware of all the fun, easy and colourful things you aren’t doing. It feels like going to a free bar and only drinking coke - your desires are always off elsewhere. 

There is basically a new form of attention growing up with tablets and ereaders. Ereaders are trying to push us back to real concentration, of near Victorian proportions. The Victorians had epic powers of concentration; people would think nothing of listening to talks for ten hours straight, and more. By removing the book we are being asked to think solely of the text.

The dominant attentional mode of recent years has been that of continual partial attention, which is basically the form of the browser and the mobile phone. Key to CPA is the concept that you are always paying attention to a multiplicity of sources, you are walking and texting, have six tabs, five programs and four emails on the go while talking. There is a continuous set of parallel streams of which is simultaneously occupying a portion of your attention. This is the condition of my working day. 

Tablets, or at least the iPad, works differently. Here you have fractured partial attention. Apps, regardless of the capabilities of the operating system, are more closed than browser tabs, and tend to force you into the environment. So far, so old media. Yet constantly hovering on the edge of your awareness are all the other apps. The result is that you constantly flit between apps, but the attention differs from CPA in that is not continuous, not simultaneous. You only really have one thing on the go at a time, but you don’t fully concentrate on it, and tend to spend only a limited time there. FPA is to tablets what CPA is to browsers. 

Fractured partial attention is what happens to continuous partial attention after it has been parsed through an App Store. Neither, alas, are good for long form reading.