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Sarah Lacy and the cult of continuous partial attention

excerpt Thanks to that strange thing called “work”, I’ve missed most of the hoo-hah about Sarah Lacy’s disastrous interview with Mark Zuckerberg at SXWS. However, there’s a point which I don’t think has really been made - the role o ...

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    Ontario Emperor 1 month ago with 1 point

    But if you're not recording the event in some way - whether it's liveblogging, livetweeting, taking notes on a laptop, or taking notes with pen and paper - how do you retain what happened at the event - or at least the important points?

    That having been said, I believe that using liveblogging/livetweeting to plan when to raise your hands en masse, or to cough en masse, or whatever, is in my view another thing entirely.

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    ianbetteridge 1 month ago with 1 point

    Record it on audio or video. Take quick notes about ideas, but nothing that will intrude into your attention too much.

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    n 1 month ago with 1 point

    i'd suggest you watch the interview to get the full impact. it really warrants the reaction, in my opinion.

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    bytehead 1 month ago with 1 point

    When has anyone given 100% attention in any meeting?

    Laptops, cellphones, PDAs, pagers. How many years do you have to go back before the technology doesn't exist? Quite a few years.

    I know of meetings where the bleeps and blips of Palms was going on because two people with them kept exchanging notes back and forth. Who knows if any of those notes were even about the meeting itself?

    What exactly is the problem? Was it the fact that people were commenting about things that were going on (which evidently they were paying attention, because they were talking about the meeting itself, not the turmoil in Tibet or whatever the news of the day was)? Or was it the fact that the meeting/interview was just wretched?

    Sarah Lacy can complain all she wants, but if it was a bad interview, she's the one to blame. People are rude. That's a fact that's been a fact even before technology.

    I just hope that Ms. Lacy has learned something of the situation, instead of just crying that it isn't fair. Life in general isn't fair.

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    ianbetteridge 1 month ago with 1 point

    I turn a cellphone off when I go into a meeting. I don't use a laptop. But that's because, as the guy commenting on Zawody's post says, I bring 100% attention.

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