Continuous Partial Attention

I discovered a great new term yesterday: CPA, which stands for Continuous Partial Attention. It was apparently coined by an executive with Apple who was speaking at a convention of, basically, geeks. While she spoke, those geeks would have been consulting their Blackberrys, surfing on their G4 laptops, doing stuff on iPods, and playing with their Treos. In other words, giving her, as she spoke, only partial attention. And she nailed them about it.

Our society is seriously afflicted with this Continous Partial Attention disorder. This includes the church. When we have denominational meetings, guys sit there listening to the bishop or keynote speakers with their laptops open, typing away as if taking notes, but everyone knows their actually responding to emails, writing sermons, or doing other things under the guise of "multi-tasking." But to me--a former transgressor, I freely admit--it's become simply rude.

When we held transition meetings with representatives from the Missionary Church, back in the merger-talks days, none of the MC guys brought laptops. But on the United Brethren side, you would see four or five laptops open. And when a laptop is open, with a clean wireless connection to the internet, it's impossible to just ignore it. The keyboard cries out, "Use me! Use me!" And so, we UBs were giving partial attention as others spoke about hugely important issues.

The same thing happened last summer at our US National Conference. Curses on the presence of wireless! And I saw it again a few weeks ago when our cluster leaders met for a two-day meeting in Hillsdale, Mich., to discuss how we were totally re-engineering the denomination. Very important stuff. But as Bishop Ramsey or Pat Jones or Tom Blaylock spoke, or as others entered into discussion, we'd have a number of guys poking away at their laptops.

This is not peculiar to UBs. It's just an example of the prevalence of CPA.

For denominational meetings, we--meaning, sacrificial tithes-payers in the pews--will spend hundreds of dollars to fly a guy or gal to Huntington. Why? Because we desire their input and wisdom and experience. But when they pay only partial attention to what's going on, I think we've wasted our money. Yeah, this partial attention malady irks me. Continuously.

Posted on March 23, 2006 09:56 PM|

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