A few days ago I was sitting at an outdoor patio on Queen Street West chatting with Melanie McBride, a Toronto-based educator and consultant on participatory educational new media. As is often the case, when two emerging media instructors get together, the talk turned to attention, and to the lack of it that is often paid by wired students to hapless instructors like us.

See, when you’re at the front of a wired classroom, you get to watch students peck at laptops, skitter their eyes over screens and, every now and then, toss a glance in your direction. Some of them are taking notes, some are chatting with friends or cruising sports sites. Few are giving their instructor undivided attention. It’s crazy making.

In our conversation, Melanie referenced two videos. One is by the veteran virtual community observer Howard Rheingold. Rheingold is now also an instructor at Berkley. In his video Rheingold shows his students what they look like from his point of view. He tells them that a former student told him that she had set up a chat room for her fellow students to use during Rheingold’s and other instructors’ classes. Rheingold didn’t know about it. She told him that, as an instructor, he had to compete for her attention along with all the blandishments and seductions of the Web. Her view was that her instructor was just another vendor in the attention economy and that it was a buyer’s market. Set aside any value judgment of that attitude, and let it sink in.

The second video Melanie called to mind was one by digital ethnographer Mike Wesch. In it Wesch beautifully illustrates how disconnected and disillusioned students are with traditional classroom education and how engaged they are with online content. One student holds up a series of handwritten signs that read: “I will read 8 books this year. 2,300 web pages & 1281 facebook profiles”. Let that sink in too.

Now, consider this. In about two weeks I’m going to be attending a conference of traditional and online journalists. During the sessionsI’m going to be using Twitter. I’ll be taking photos and I’ll shoot video. I’ll peck at my laptop, my eyes will skitter over my multiple screens and, every now and then, I’ll toss an unmediated glance in the direction of the presenter. I will be my own worst audience.

So, apart from me being an attention hypocrite, what can we make of this? McBride, like Rheingold, points out that one of the things we ported over to new media from traditional media was the notion of the passive audience. We’ve continued to expect students, viewers and conference participants to not split their attention cycles between the real and virtual worlds, or between the relatively passive world of the classroom lecture and the siren call of the interactive online communities and conversations.

For McBride that chittering back channel itself isn’t the problem. The problem is, as instructors, we haven’t given it anything useful to do. “Students are telling us they want to be engaged. So, we need to find a way to give them specific focus for that back channel. If they’re doing stuff that’s on-task we’re going to get engaged learning and ownership,” she says.

That’s smart. Activists and non-profits should apply the same idea to our websites and social media. Too often we treat the Web as if it were a broadcast. Yes, we have discussion forums like babble, which are very useful, but we should be giving our audiences, especially our blogging audiences, more on-task things to do.

Here’s an example. Earlier this year the Dundas, Ontario-based Social Media Group introduced an innovative type of social media press release they call Digital Snippets. They’re already being used by clients like Ford and they’re great for an organization with an ongoing social or issue narrative. The format gives bloggers and vidcasters the quick facts and easy multimedia they need to spread the word.

Here’s another simple example. Sprout lets you create no-coders-needed, Flash-based buttons, badges and ads that can contain multimedia content, can be easily embedded on websites and blogs and can even report back to headquarters on how many times Sprout elements like “Donate” buttons get clicked on. Creating and promoting these kinds of shareable applets is an easy way to sprinkle attention lenses around.

Both are ways of putting the back channel to good use. And since, as PR mavens David Jones and Doug Walker point out in a recent Shill podcast, attention really is the true currency of the Web, giving good tools to your audience to draw attention for your mission is something you should be raising your head from your screen to focus on.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...