Dispatches from the war on flow
November 10, 2007 :: by Lee 0 responses
Col. Stowe Boyd of the 101st airborne social forces dropped by last week to provide Headshifters with a report from the frontline of the war on flow.
Stowe has made the point elsewhere about flow that network productivity trumps individual productivity, and this idea is very much in line with what we are trying to do inside corporate networks. He talks about what we have learned from the experience of early adopters of social tools, especially blogging, presence tools, IM and newsfeeds, and argues that this is a precursor to the evolution of new skills and capabilities that enable people to thrive in the new world of flow, multi-tasking and social networking. Based on the McLuhan-ish idea that we make our machines and then our machines shape us, Stowe is optimistic that this new way of living with information will unlock hitherto untapped sources of human potential, compared to the old world of sequential task processing and single-dimension focus.
But he also warns that there are vested interests out there who are fighting a war on flow, which they see as disruptive and damaging to concentration and behaviour. Stowe's debate with Linda Stone regarding Continuous Partial Attention is obviously an influence here, but the issue is wider than that. He believes mass media and advertising will fight to retain their role as mediators and packagers of 'content' that we consume, and other as-yet un-disintermediated sources of authority will similarly resist flow as it undermines obedience. As with everything else, it is about balance. Can we learn to live with flow but still retain enough concentration in the physical world to remain human?
This is a very interesting area and has produced some mind-boggling commentary on our internal wiki, which I couldn't begin to summarise here. It was also a useful contribution to a rather ambitious product development process we are currently involved in, but I can't talk about that yet ;-)
