Image by Erik Lucatero from Pixabay
I was skimming an article when three words popped out of the grey text. They were “continuous partial attention”.
That pings a bell, I thought, pausing only to pick up my iPhone and scan social media, check my three email addresses and see if anything new had crawled out from beneath the news stone.
And I don’t even work any more, or hardly at all.
The article in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine was by Sophie McBain and had the headline, ‘Welcome to the golden age of stupidity.’ Technological advances are shrinking IQ scores, leading to brain rot, and “making it hard to work, remember, think and function”, apparently.
New technologies from the printed word onwards have always weathered such accusations, but is the advent of artificial intelligence only going to make matters worse?
A question to which the poached halves of my brain can only respond with an elongated ‘err’ followed by an ‘umm’.
I can’t yet claim to understand artificial intelligence, you see. We seem to be at the stage where everyone nods wisely and mutters ‘artificial intelligence’ without exactly knowing what it means or how it will affect our lives.
Even our government has been at it, suggesting that AI will make everything better and ‘grow the economy’, to call on those dullard words from the political lexicon.
Well, maybe, but has anyone bothered yet to read the terms and conditions, or is it just like always, where you tick the box at the end of a scree of words you don’t read, thinking oh, it’ll be all right.
But let’s settle for now with this notion that using artificial intelligence rather than our own intelligence might be damaging. To borrow the hackneyed phrase ‘use it or lose it’, it seems reasonable to suppose that asking AI to do everything for us won’t stretch our own brains much.
Thinking round a problem is an ancient skill, something humans are good at.
The tech consultant and academic Linda Stone term coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in the late 90s after noticing how her students “seemed to be trying to do 20 things at once”.
This notion of being continually but shallowly distracted resonates with me, not least because sometimes this blog is composed of bits and pieces found on social media (once Twitter as was, now mostly Threads), alongside snippets of news, stories clipped from newsprint, words half-heard on the radio.
That’ll make a piece, the distraction motor known as my brain pipes up, just as something else is spotted. Then the newspaper I was half-reading is dropped, or the TV programme I was half-watching no longer grabs my attention, later leading me ask, annoyingly, “What just happened there?”
There is always something in the blog snippet drawer, where potential items live, or mostly go to die. And look, oh, that actor we were wondering about, she was in that thing we liked, the one on BBC4, or Channel 4, or maybe ITV, possibly Netflix.
This digital splintering of our attention span, this need to glance away from what we are doing, risks leaving us unable to adsorb anything at all, doesn’t it?
Our smartphones are amazing slim tablets of everything. But they also give us the cheap hit of knowledge when all we’ve done is Google a question and received an instant answer. That’s miraculous in a sense, but the lack of effort involved is worrying, as too it out-sourcing our knowledge to US corporations.
Still, those of us old enough to know better can remember when life was different, grainier, less instant.
Today’s young people have no such experience, as has been shown in the new series of Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire, above. The students are very attached to their smart phones; one sparky girl was even suspended and sent home rather than give up her phone for the school day.
For the teaching staff at Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, first seen on TV 12 years ago, the most significant changes have been around mobiles and mental health.
Headteacher Matthew Burton is quoted below from a BBC website feature about the series:
“On the whole, there’s a lot more access to the internet and there are a lot more challenges around teenage mental health and anxiety. On the flip side of that, young people these days are much more attuned to their own mental health and how they’re feeling and are able to ask for the help they need, so we’re really proud of them.”
It’s a wonderful series, well worth a watch, mostly to be reminded of the wit, spirit and undying cussedness of teenagers.
As for this particular blog, it was composed almost without distraction or even one peek in the oddments drawer, leaving all those rancid leftover scraps about Trump and Farage untouched for now.