David Barrie

What's your 'personal bandwidth'?

'Multi-tasking' has never been enough of a catch-all to describe the non-automatic processing that goes on in life.  Sure, we all manage to do several things at once. But what about the fact that we tend to pay several things continuous partial attention most of the time?

Writer Linda Stone, a former senior executive at Apple and Microsoft, has just nailed it.

In the Harvard Business Review's annual survey of emerging ideas, Stone presents the idea of 'Living with Continuous Partial Attention':

constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It's an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing......The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.

'Personal bandwidth'? What a brilliant idea!

I spend so much time online and in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's mental state of flow, it's becoming hard to discriminate between real and virtual experience. There are intermittent, unfinished SMS conversations going on on my phone. A call waits on Skype. And I've headphones on, listening to a playlist. All engage my continuous partial attention.

Aside from needing to get a life, what's my 'personal bandwidth'? What's yours? It's width? And where are the edges?

Chaos Theory

15012007122, originally uploaded by wallakazoo.

A messy desk, a cluttered sidewalk, tousled hair, a pile of junk in the corner - let's hear it for confusion and mayhem.

In A Perfect Mess, authors Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman write in defense of mess. They say that a messy desk is more efficient than a neatly labelled filing cabinet, since it reflects the way the brain is organized and allows for serendipitous discovery.

I'm sure that this is true. But also just as we think of pollution as something that dirties the environment rather than heats it up, we insist upon believing that lack of clutter equals clarity of vision.

We're wrong. Mayhem and mishmash isn't just a true representation of the haphazardness of life or a symbolic expression of our fears and memories - exemplified by the work of American artist Paul McCarthy and Austrian designer Wolf Prix. It does, at times, truly reflect what's going on.
 

Mess is also what makes life diverse and worth living - what architect Robert Venturi once described  in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as  "contradiction juxtaposed".

In my mind, I love the art of Donald Judd, tidy sidewalks, buildings by Tadao Ando and anything Bang & Olufsen.

But in my heart, minimalism is hollow - and splatter, honky tonk and the ordinary is often more solid and pleasurable.

The Day the world turned Day-glo

00180m, originally uploaded by pandoraswardrobe.

Let's not worry for the moment about Size 0. Aren't these colors great!

Suddenly, with the work of fashion designer Christopher Kane, the catwalk has turned neon.

Death to all blackness, Mulberry mute and a world in which bikini color culture was restricted to just a couple of weeks a year.

And welcome to a new, fleeting, tilt-shift moment, when color is so intense it floats, walkways are lit by artist Dan Flavin, and the exotic is brilliant not bordello - highlighter pen not musty, scented candle.

Death of a producer

TV producers on location, Castleford, Yorkshire, 2006

The idea of the death of the media producer has finally started to take hold - and it's a natural death, not a bullet in the head from a distressed contributor.

In the London Times, American columnist Andrew Sullivan writes of the power of video content on political blogs, the realism of high definition television and how a video posting on You Tube destroyed the campaign of Senator George Allen and of John McCain asleep during the State of the Union address has damaged his reputation. Sullivan writes:

Television altered democratic life in every developed country in the last century. The difference in this one will be that the editors and producers and channels and media companies will cease mediating it. Television will be in the voters' hands. And democracy will just have to cope.

It's a realisation that's been a long time coming. It looks to a future role for producers as hybrid workers specialising in managing networks of people and their content and becoming part of a larger, personalised support economy for the consumer. TV producers as network managers. Or personal shoppers.

Sullivan's comments start to show mainstream media up as repetitive, reductive and dated, hankering after the viewer in a way that's like someone walking behind you, begging you to turn round and take a look .

Perhaps it will force the media to fulfill a function that John William Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation identified in his comment that

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

The question is: what's the nature of the institution that delivers this? When are we going to start thinking of media producers as designers of public and private realms? And at what stage will terrestrial broadcasters bite the bullet, reduce capacity and stop filling blank, black, broadcast airtime with colored light?

Me, I'm off to Selfridges to meet my personal shopper and get my video Pod reloaded.