Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a general description applied to people who have trouble staying focused on something, such as a task, a conversation, or minor surgery.  People with ADD are often inattentive, impulsive, and hyper-active--pretty good characteristics for creative types, but not so good for people who operate heavy machinery or dispense prescription medication.

Actually, people I know with ADD are quite happy with their "condition," and I'll admit they're fun to be around.  They're happy, lively, and good at delivering clever one-liners.  Still, I wouldn't want all my friends to have short-attention spans.  I need a few people in my life who at least act like they're paying attention to what I have to say, even if I'm babbling. 

I'm finding that it's getting more difficult to find people who pay attention.  The whole world, it seems, has ADD, and it's not because everyone is drinking the same kool-aid--unless the kool-aid happens to be a  Blackberry or an iPhone.  Call me an anti-luddite, but the way I see it, our collective ADD is directly related to our dependency upon--or maybe I should say our addiction to--hand-held electronic communication devices, and it's killing the practice of paying attention.

Obviously, I'm not the first one to notice this.  Linda Stone, who's held VP positions at Apple and Microsoft, first coined the phrase "continuous partial attention" more than ten years ago to describe a condition wherein people pay partial attention...continously.  It's always been around, but with the proliferation of mobile electronic devices that give us the ability to instantly connect with people 24/7, continuous partial attention has come to dominate our lives. 

It's not that Blackberries, iPhones and iPods are in themselves evil.  But when they come to define who we are and how we communicate, these devices we use to connect with others end up disconnecting us.  As Linda Stone observes, "We are so accessible, we're inaccessiable."  

Bill McKibben, writing the Foreword to an excellent book by Maggie Jackson entitled Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, agrees:  "Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment."

So what do we do?  Chuck our Blackberries into the sea?  Melt down our iPhones and iPods into costume jewelry?  Obviously, that's not the answer, although on more than one occasion I have had to suppress the urge to grab some annoying person's cellphone and throw it across the room (you know what I'm talking about).  No, the problem is not the device.  It's the user.  It's us.  When I ask the question, "So what do we do?" I really mean, "So what do we do with us?"  

If you have any ideas or practical steps you've taken to pay more attention to tasks, conversations, and minor surgery, I'd love to hear them, and so would the rest of the Conversant community.