Attention and Focus: Distracted, Loss of Critical Thinking

There is an interesting interview on Point of Inquiry by the author of a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here is the link:

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/maggie_jackson_distracted_the_erosion_of_attention_and_the_coming_dark_age/

The book has only 3.5 stars on Amazon, and ironically one of the comments says the book is a prime example of what it condemns!

Anyway, the observations the author and host D.J. Grothe make are about the increasing number of "connections" that people have via the online, networked world, but the decreasing depth and fluency of those connections. They discuss how these days people are expected to know more about a larger number of things.

This reminds me of the concept of the long tail, described here: http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html.
The crux of the long tail is that people now buy fewer items of a larger number of items, such
that the total volume of sales across the larger number equals the total volume of sales for the most popular market leaders.



So, it seems as if people are stretching themselves to pay attention to more and more things across a long tail because they feel that knowing that little bit across the horizontal scope complements the larger amount they know about a few things in the vertical rise.

Scott Ambler has written about the "Generalizing specialist" in terms of Agile teams on his blog here: http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm

Here is a brief excerpt:

A generalizing specialist is someone with a good grasp of how everything fits together. As a result they will typically have a greater understanding and appreciation of what their teammates are working on. They are willing to listen to and work with their teammates because they know that they’ll likely learn something new. Specialists, on the other hand, often don’t have the background to appreciate what other specialists are doing, often look down on that other work, and often aren’t as willing to cooperate. Specialists, by their very nature, can become a barrier to communication within your team.

So, are long tails and generalizing specialists intrinsically linked to the distraction topic or am I proving the author's point by just introducing tangents?

Well, I think they are related, and not necessarily bad. The decrease of attention and erosion of critical thinking is bad, no doubt, because it represents an inability for people to perform the top-to-bottom in-depth analysis needed to make wise decisions.

However, the increased side-to-side attentiveness is good in that it shows that people are becoming more aware of the relationships and connections of parts into a whole.

Understanding that whole, however, requires a thorough understanding of the top-to-bottom view of, at minimum, a complete vertical slice of a process.

In software engineering, this means that a developer can grasp the overall architecture of a system by having a thorough and deep knowledge of one particular module, top-to-bottom, if and only if that module is representative of the larger system as a whole.

That is to say that the module under examination follows the same basic design structure and coding standards, design principles, and design patterns that are adhered to by the rest of the system. This helps achieve something akin to the concept of economies of scale.

On the other hand, if an engineer must contend with dozens of differing formats, approaches, spaghetti code bases, incompatible languages and toolsets, then a lot of understanding is lost or can never be gained simply due to something like the effects of diseconomies of scale.

For a team to achieve a level of productivity and efficiency in software engineering, they have to apply design principles that are in accordance with shared purpose, communication, maintainability, and flexibility. Creativity is an important aspect, but creativity should be expressed in terms of solving the problem domain in terms of the most understandable and simple design, rather than in terms of the most terse, most elegant or innovative, or unique design.

This may at first sound rigid and unflexible, but the introduction of basic, rudimentary constraints, such as the generic interface seen in REST, provides a context within which creativity can be expressed, yet also affords communication and connectivity to external components without cumbersome setup time or negotiation.

So, to bring this back to the idea of distraction, I want to point out that it is important for people to use the tools they have to help them find the right path, and then focus intently on understanding that path and exploring that path to the fullest, to understand it from the top-to-bottom, and to build in the side-to-side extension mechanisms to enable future modification and expansion without impact to the core features and functionality.

These are core principles expressed in the literature of design patterns and agile design guidelines, but they must be carefully studied and learned. They cannot be gleaned by glancing over a few web sites or thumbing through a few books. They have to be explored, experimented with, and ultimately employed in real systems in order for engineers to comprehend them fully.