How to Break the Information Age Trance of 'Continuous Partial Attention

by **bdahm** Tue Jan 19, 2016 11:24 am

Hand wringing about the "distraction economy" and the general decline in humans' attention-giving abilities is by now a cliche. We get it: user interfaces are everywhere, competing for just a few seconds of our braintime to probably sell us something, and this is bad. We think better when we can actually think about one thing.
We're not winning the attention war it would seem, but we also haven't lost it. In a piece published in the January edition of Computer, Andreas Bulling, a human-computer interface (HCI) researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, argues that winning the sustained attention of technology users (everyone) is perhaps the most pressing and difficult challenge in the entire HCI field. Whoever finally cracks the attention problem will likely wind up a very rich person.
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http://d.pr/TGRG

-Bill