Continuous partial attention (CPA) is the process of paying simultaneous attention to a number of sources of incoming information, but at a superficial level. The term was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: "It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish."
Stone has clarified that CPA is not the same as multi-tasking. Where multi-tasking is driven by a conscious desire to be productive and efficient, CPA is an automatic process, motivated only by "a desire to be a live node on the network". Compared to multi-tasking, full attention is not required by CPA (hence the "partial") and the process is ongoing rather than episodic (hence the "continuous").
Famous quotes containing the words continuous, partial and/or attention:
“The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others—this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world’s peoples.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traffic is not morally second.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)