360°

In broadcast media, the buzzword is “360°”. This is supposed to mean multi-platform programming, although nobody really seems to understand what that is, beyond online catch-up and facebook pages for shows. The theory is that you let viewers access content (or bits of content) via different media/platforms and then interact with the content more than in the traditional broadcast model. It doesn’t really work that way in practice. The closest most shows get to User Generated Content (despite the great work done during the writers’ strike a couple of years ago) is red-button/premium phone voting, and facebook and web-forum sniping.

The fact is that we’re not very good at focussing on more than one thing at a time, or watching multiple screens or windows simultaneously (which is almost certainly why those annoying ads with the automatic unmutable sound were invented. We’re better with multi-layered sounds than visuals).

At work, we opend several documents/windows and jump from one to the other to the first, cross-referecing, updating, task-hopping and calling it multi-tasking when in fact it’s more like hopscotch – leaping from one point of precariously balance to the next in an attempt to get it all done.

In certain martial arts styles, you learn to block and strike simultaneously – which is damn difficult because the big, unspoken failing of multi-tasking is that humanity isn’t very good at rubbing its stomach while patting its head.

Any steps I take to simplify life has to deal with this fact. Trying to streamline my time by multi-tasking seems almost doomed to failure, unless I can somehow translate the martial arts skills to the rest of my life – once, of course, I manage to acquire them. After all, driving a car (which I’ve been doing for years now) requires a certain amount of multi-tasking, mainly on a purely physical-memory level, allowing the consciousness to pay attention to the road ahead, the conversation in the car, the song on the radio, the directions being followed.

Maybe that’s the root of the pat-head-rub-stomach issue – that we tend to think about it too much when it should be muscle memory, which would allow us the consciousness to think about how stupid we look.