Is ConTwitterous partial attention stealing away our minds?

If everyone is busy Twittering, is anyone really paying attention? I pondered that question last week during a conference in which the majority of people in the sessions I attended were posting a constant stream of Tweets.

Let me start by saying that I'm new to Twitter culture. I've used the service in limited ways. But my exposure to the Twitter firehose as a major component of a conference happened last week at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium. In an audience of about 40 people some 20 to 25 appeared to be Twittering throughout the event.

Attendees split their time between glancing up at the speakers, writing up Tweets and contemplating other missives on their laptops and smart phones. The furrowed brows, the serious expressions of concentration, were focused not so much on the speakers but downward toward those little screens as everyone tried to keep up with the backchannel discusions, react, and add their two cents to the conversation.

I am from a generation that would have considered such behavior rude, but the conference organizers participated in and encouraged the online discussion. So I joined the conversation. Another attendee showed me the ropes and I began posting, tagging each Tweet with #SNCR and tracking what folks were saying by searching on the tag at search.twitter.com and Twemes.

SNCR in the Tweetosphere

So what was going on in the back channel? Tweets mostly consisted of summarizations, elaborations and chatter. SNCR staff and others were posting key takeways from the event: "Challenges of Online News Releases: 1.Cutting Through Clutter; 2. Targeting and Distribution; 3. Measurement." "Biggest obstacles to making communities work 1) getting people to engage 2)finding enough time to manage the community."

Others added content to the discussion: "Interested in how need to connect w/people is hard wired? see book Social Intelligence."

One person was adding photos of the speakers and attendees to flickr: "Flickr Pic : sncr snicker http://tinyurl.com/6yjmu5"

Then there were the questions, debates and trivia:

"ok (& I agree) but who should be in charge of social media in an organization?"

"which table are you? I'm stage left, front"

"headache setting in. Anyone at #SNCR have any ibuprofin? : \"

Finally there was an element of excitement in playing the Twitter game. "come on #SNCR tweets, let's get ranked again today!" "my Twitterank is higher than 80.06% of twitterers! http://twitterank.com/view/sncr"

I asked another attendee, Nora Gamin Barnes, professor at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth to explain what value she sees in all this. Is it just chatter, a distraction? No, she contended, the back channel conversation augments the event and provides valuable information, including links to related resources. But I'm still not sure.

I found very few links to other resources in the hundreds of Tweets that went by. The Tweet stream was mostly a regurgitation of key points and attendees weighing in - mostly positively - about what was being said.

Much of it was chatter. But instead of holding those offline conversations until later - over lunch during a break - the converations were taking place while the speakers were still talking.

What is the value of providing those minute by minute updates to your friends versus just taking some notes and checking in with them later?

More importantly, what is the cost of this need to immediatly and continously report and analyze? Is something lost when you split your attention in this way? While the Twitter stream was complementary, I couldn't help but feel that the speakers were competing with Twitter for attention. At one point one presenter made an inquiry of an attendee who was was typing rapidly into a handheld with her thumbs. She looked up, surprised. Aha! Caught in the act of not paying attention, I thought. I felt like I was back in high school, when the teacher catches someone daydreaming. The woman looked up, apologized, but then turned her attention to her handheld and explained aloud that she was really, truly Twittering about the session - honest!

To me, Twittering on the computer while someone ten feet in front of me was presenting felt like the electronic equivalent of leaning over to my neighbor and engaging in a side conversation in whispered tones.

But perhaps I don't understand the culture. Today is it OK to not give your full attention to the person who has spent time preparing a presentation for you? At least, if you are Twittering on that subject it is apparently OK to pay only partial attention. You have an excuse.

But what is the benefit of disseminating those 140 character missives in real time - and what is the cost to ourselves of the distraction in terms of our ability to absorb the information?

Here's a familiar refrain you probably heard in high school or college: "OK everyone, I want you to put down your pencils and just listen. There is plenty of time for taking notes but for right now I just want you to look up here and listen to me." I'm not sure how many times I've heard that from a teacher or professor. They made the request because they knew that if they didn't have students' full attention they wouldn't fully absorb what was about to be said. Students in a class can be so busy writing notes that they aren't really listening. The students have a bunch of carefully crafted notes but no depth of understanding.

Twittering takes that to a new level of distraction. If you're twittering about the last statement the lecturer made and reading and reacting to responses are you really taking in the next point? I found myself getting miles away from what the presenter was talking about. I fell behind.

In a column on our inability to pay attention, Computerworld columnist Thornton May wrote: "Linda Stone, a former researcher at Microsoft, coined the phrase "continuous partial attention," that is, paying partial attention to everything continuously. It's OK in small doses, she says, but in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions and to think creatively. Stone has also noted that those of us in this industry think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth, then we do, too. And that's how we sometimes miss the really important things, even though we think we're tuned to catch everything."

Michael Neal dealt with similar issues with e-mail shortly after joining Microsoft. Neal's culture shock came after his company Connectix was acquired and he discovered that Microsoft is run by people who are too busy answering e-mail to look at him in meetings.

Unlike e-mail, which is asnychronous, Twitter is a continuous series of real-time conversations that are neverending. Thanks to SMS it also has the power to interrupt, just like a telephone. It is fun, addicting, distracting, maddening.

But you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Twitter is a tool that's not going away. The question is how best to use it?