  next >    Former VP, Microsoft & Co-Founder & Director,
Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group
Breathtaking New Technologies  In the past few years, I have
been thinking and writing about "attention", and specifically,
"continuous partial attention". The impetus came from my years
of working at Apple, and then, Microsoft, where I thought a lot
about user interface as well as our relationship to the tools we
create.  I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of
the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our
attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse
it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it
with pharmaceuticals.   But lately I have observed that the way
in which many of us interact with our personal technologies
makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention
to our advantage.  In observing others — in their offices, their
homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath
especially when they first begin