A thought provoking journey into your attention span and how new technologies create new (a)social behavior.  Keynote by: Linda Stone, author and thought leader with a background as VP at Microsoft and long time executive with Apple who coined the term “continuous partial attention”.

This post is in response to @caliyost post about  encore career planning.  In the post (Which is a good read by the way) @caliyost references @heymarci who suggests “that the core tenants of an Encore Career are 1) continued income, 2) personal meaning, and 3) social impact”  I do not disagree with these tenants and believe that they are ones which will benefit a lot of people.  My question however to @caliyost was, “If “encore planning” is the new vision of retirement. How do we account for the “me know” & “attention economy” mindset?  The response was rather a question. A good skill to use for any budding detectives out there!  ”Thanks for the RT and follow. Tell me more about your thoughts on “me know” and how it relates to encore career planning.”  Given the fact that twitter only allows me to reply in 140 characters,I thought it would be easier to reply back here (@caliyost I hope you don’t mind?).  I will try I and state my agument and rationale below.

My thoughts on the “Me Know” and “Attention Economy” are as follows: Humans are invariable creatures who seek reward and are driven by self interest or “Me Know” activities. As humans we will continue to do things we know we can do. Yes this may seem rather boring and dull, however we are I believe creatures of habit and repetition.  The “Me Know” activities can also be linked to the “Me Now” activities, see Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as example of this argument.  These are the base needs that we all have. Political, economical, social and technological factors can all impact on how large a part one’s “Me Know” activities are. Traders who worked in the financial services industries it could be argued had a rather large slice of the “Me Know” and “Me Now” cake!  Society however has now said enough is enough and has demanded accountability and more transparency. This however did not and does not change the fact that we now live in a “Attention Economy” where consumers want, need and desire more time, money and energy to do the things they want to do faster, quicker and better than they did before.

I suppose in writing this post, the question has been answered by myself, which is to say that while I believe @heymarci‘s argument that we should all strive for an Encore Career, we should also be aware that we also live in a world that rewards success (unfortunate as it may be) and penalises failure and to forget and underestimate this fact would certainly impact on my future retirement plans!

For more information on the “Attention Economy” visit www.readwriteweb.com for an overview.

Great must read artlice from David Armano about Earning Trust In Streams = Attention + Influence.  In his post he suggests that there are various streams that we all go through and use. Email for example is a stream.  

He also comments on the fact that while “getting in the stream” may be doable from both technical if not clever means (PR firms know how to do this), trust is another story. Trust equals attention. It’s that simple. And right now, everything comes down to attention.

We’re all overloaded by demands for our time and most of us can’t invest in filtering activities 24-7, so we default to giving our attention to those we trust. And this is where it comes full circle back to the e-mail example. Trust has to be earned, and once earned it leads to attention. Trust can be broken and there are multiple levels of trust.  

Read the whole article on Earning Trust In Streams = Attention + Influence